


Dissolution and Unbinding

by mijra



Series: Dissolution and Unbinding [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark Magic, Friendship, Gen, Growing Up, Potions, Prejudice, Soul Bond, extra credit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-31
Updated: 2014-06-01
Packaged: 2018-01-27 19:47:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 51,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1720418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mijra/pseuds/mijra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"It's best to be prepared," Hermione argues. "We're going to have to put together a survival kit this year."</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Autumn Term

**Author's Note:**

> This was an accidental, very belated NaNo project in 2012 and probably needs a lot more fine-tuning than I've given it. This work is complete and will update as I finish excising my "[fix this]" and "[ugh, more here]" notes throughout the original draft.
> 
> Seventh year. Canon characters, canon universe, not canon-compliant with book events starting with OotP, give or take.

Harry stops answering her owls mid-summer.

He isn't there when her parents take her to visit the Weasleys, either, but that's just as well. Hermione already has her hands full with the adults and barely has time to catch up with Ron. Mrs Weasley keeps calling her back into the kitchen to taste things and confirm that her parents will eat this or that, and then Hermione traps herself into setting the table and serving by politely asking if she can do anything to help. She has to translate between Mr Weasley and her dad, and her mum needs to be baby-sat, or she'll do nothing but tell embarrassing stories of when Hermione was little, for lack of other children to shame or other easy subjects in common with Mrs Weasley. What's worse, Fleur Weasley makes her mum feel frumpy. Hermione can tell from the way her mum keeps patting her hair and smoothing her skirt.

Ron sits next to her at lunch and kicks her ankles whenever she has her fork full because he thinks it's funny when she misses her mouth. In between passing the peas and the salt--but never _to_ anyone because the Weasleys are superstitious--and arguing about who should be on whose team for quidditch after dessert, she manages to extract the information that Harry hasn't written to Ron, either.

"Maybe something's happened," she says to Ron.

He licks his fingers while their parents are too busy with Hermione's mum's mobile phone to scold him.

"Ronald Bilius Weasley," says Ginny from several seats down. "That is absolutely disgusting."

Ron ignores her. "Like what?"

"This is why I'm the one running around trying to keep you two alive," Hermione says primly. "Anything could happen."

"Hermione," Ron says, stretching her name into at least six syllables.

"It's best to be prepared," Hermione argues. "We're going to have to put together a survival kit this year."

Ron groans. "Are we going to have to make an antidote to every--"

Hermione kicks him: the examination of Hermione's mum's mobile has ended abruptly when her dad reclaims it before Mr Weasley discovers how to take the battery out.

If Ron's going to be difficult about something that will possibly save Harry's--and Ron's--life, Hermione sees no reason to subject herself to a game of quidditch just to round out his team. When the bludgers make her parents flinch, Hermione suggests that it might be better if she joined them on the sidelines where she can explain the fouls.

Her dad narrows his eyes at her as if he knows something's up. Hermione doesn't care; the probability of him guessing correctly that her real problem is with the brooms is almost non-existent.

"Dad," she pesters him when they're all safely piled back into the car and on the motorway back home. "What would you put in a survival kit?"

"Matches," he says, raising his eyebrows at her in the rearview mirror. "I don't know, honey."

"A toothbrush," says her mum, the consummate dentist. "And socks. It's always best to have a change of socks."

The list of supplies Hermione draws up later is something she knows she can never show her parents: dittany (the list begins), at least one bezoar, a spare wand, floo powder, pensieve... She starts listing potions that could be useful but quickly realizes that Ron was right: there's more she wants to take than she could brew in a year, especially if she's the only one doing the brewing. Because she loves her parents, she adds matches and socks at the end.

Ron gets himself back into Hermione's good graces two days later when he goes through his mum's trunk of stuff from the potions mastery that she never finished after Bill was born and sends Hermione her musty copy of _An Inexhaustible Introduction to Potions Proficiency_. Hermione can't get to the index in the back because the book has a No Cheating Spell on it to keep readers from skipping the boring parts; it has to be read in order. She's stuck turning pages for hours. There's a coffee-like stain that obscures parts of the bottom half of pages seventeen through one hundred and six. Mrs Weasley underlined all the proper nouns and drew arrows pointing to passages that are particularly poorly written until second page of the forty-third chapter, after which the page turning gets a lot duller.

Chapter eighty-one is entitled, "Staying Sane: When Not To Brew", and chapter eighty-two opens with a four-page description of potions bases, stable compounds to which key ingredients can be added in order to save brewing time or to pre-produce potions with short shelf lives. Hermione gives up on the index and settles on the glider on her parents' porch to do some serious reading. She starts taking notes when she gets to the Universal Base, a potion that combines several bases in precise stages. It can be used as a base for a list of potions long enough to make Hermione balk at memorizing it at first. She copies it out and carries the stapled pages with her everywhere until she's nearly reciting it in her sleep. (Aging Potion, Alihotsy Draught, Angel's Trumpet Draught, Anti-Paralysis Potion...) She lets herself have a bit of a lie-in the next morning, rereading parts of the chapter and drawing up arguments to convince Professor Snape to let her try to brew it. (...Baneberry Potion, Befuddlement Draught, Black Fire Potion, Blood-Replenishing Potion, Bundimun Secretion...)

And then there's no more time left; she's standing on platform nine-and-three-quarters hugging her parents and then they're gone. (...Calming Draught, Chelidonium Miniscula, Cough potion...)

\---

The first years crowding the corridor on the Hogwarts Express get old after the first several years of not being a first year oneself. They drag their luggage about and then leave it wherever happens to suit them, often because the bottom luggage racks are full and they can't reach the upper ones. They follow the candy cart and are afraid to share compartments with anyone already wearing house colours, and they cluster, trying to see the card whenever someone opens a chocolate frog.

A Hufflepuff girl--Hermione can't tell who it is from the back, but she can see the yellow stripes of her house colours--is trying to herd some of the first years into compartments at the other end of the next carriage. She’s working with another student whose head and shoulders are covered for a moment by a child-sized Self-Spreading Duvet that’s gotten loose from someone’s trunk. Draco Malfoy’s blond hair emerges a moment later as he wrestles it down.

"Lavender said yes!" is the first thing Ron says to her when Hermione finally makes it to compartment O, where Harry and Neville are sitting across from one another. Ron's leaning against the window. Neville's sharing his seat with Hedwig's cage and several potted plants; she throws herself down on the forward-facing seat with Harry.

"He asked her if she'd be his girlfriend," Neville says, stroking Hedwig's beak through the bars. "Luna already said it was probable, so there you go."

Ron squeezes in between Hermione and Harry. They both scoot apart to make room for him, though they no longer actually fit three on a seat between Hermione's hips and Ron's shoulders and Harry, who is all arms and legs. Neville eyes them shyly like he might like to join them but isn't sure whose lap he belongs in. Hermione mouths an apology at him.

"Your mum cut your hair too short," she tells Ron. It makes his head look square.

"Yeah? Well, I can tell you ran out of Sleekeasy." Ron sticks his fingers in her hair and pulls until she winces.

"How are you, Harry?" Hermione asks.

"Peachy," Harry grouses, squinting. "I've had the same headache since my birthday."

"Let me see your glasses."

"There's nothing wrong with them," Harry says, but passes them around Ron. Hermione cleans the lenses of several weeks of grime with a flick of her wand, reveling in the satisfaction of the rush of magic through her veins, again, at last. Harry pushes the glasses up his nose, twice, though the second time they haven't yet slid down.

"Ron, your mum's book is brilliant. Here's what we need to do," Hermione declares. She takes a deep breath and begins the summary of what she's been reading for the past month.

\---

"If it isn't Miss Granger." Professor Snape doesn't bother to stop sorting through the little green-wrapped packages on his desk. He cuts the Spellotape on a crate of brand-new Slytherin regalia with a spell. The cover pries itself off and settles on his straight-backed chair under the direction of his wand.

Hermione takes a preparatory breath. (...Dizziness Draught, Doxycide, Dreamless Sleep Potion, Erumpent Potion, Fatiguing Infusion, Fire-Protection Potion--no, there were more E’s than that--)

"I shan't bite," Professor Snape interrupts, unwrapping a stack of student schedule cards like the ones Hermione has filled out every year, except hers always have a lion pacing across the bottom instead of a snake winding itself up the left margin. The year Professor McGonagall authorized her to use the time-turner, she had to fill out three.

"I--" says Hermione, having prepared an entire speech that has vanished as thoroughly as if he's performed a memory spell.

He focuses on her then with what is probably supposed to be courtesy but which Hermione has always experienced as intimidation. There's just his broad desk, covered at the moment in green and silver, and various shelves full of books and curiosities in cloudy glass jars. The other professors usually have at least a chair for a student to use, but here she has only the options of standing in the doorway, or standing closer to the desk. Professor McGonagall has a little table and often offers tea.

"Happy fall term, Professor," Hermione says, because it's easier.

He raises an eyebrow and steeples his long hands at that, as though it's obvious she hasn't come all the way down to his office before the Sorting just for that. She might have, though; she's already been to see Professor McGonagall and she said hello to Professor Sprout when she was looking for Neville. Professor Snape examines her as though she were a particularly specious ingredient, looking for hidden defects. "Spit it out."

"I want to brew the Universal Base," she says, long-conditioned to reply to the unsubtle command in that particular shade of his voice, and hurries to justify herself, ticking the reasons off on her fingers: "The ingredients are common enough. I'll purchase anything I need. It would teach me to be consistent, and concentrated. A Universal Base requires a variety of brewing techniques, but we've already learnt most of them, except things like Bundling, but I've been researching that already and I think I could do it. It would be such good practice, you know--"

"Enough," Professor Snape says. "You haven't the skills to complete it."

"Isn't that the point of asking for help?" says Hermione.

"You can try, I suppose," he concedes irritably.

\---

After the Sorting, in the middle of dessert, Harry drops a mug of pumpkin juice with a cry of pain. He clutches his head, his eyes clenched shut. Hermione stops sponging the splatter off her robes with a napkin when he doesn't say he's fine in response to her, "what in the world, Harry?"

Hermione and Ron pull Harry up between them. She glances up at the high table for help, but half the professors are missing and Professor Binns is the only one who isn't looking at something else. He stands on his chair and wrings his ghostly hands and Hermione can just make out his, "oh dear, oh dear," over the general din of the Great Hall.

"Hospital wing?" Ron asks her.

"Yes," she says.

They don't expected to be ignored when they get there. The Heads of House, Professor Dumbledore, and Madam Pomfrey are already clustered around a bed at the far end of the ward. A house-elf is mopping blood up with a rag, but it keeps stopping to wring the rag out, and by the time it turns back, the blood is pooling on the floor again.

Harry is shivering against her shoulder and Ron is in the middle of asking what they should do when Professor Snape notices them. He sweeps down the length of the ward with his robes billowing behind him. He spreads his arms as if to hold them back. "What are you three doing here?"

Ron shrinks from the professor, turning away, but Hermione only flinches and wraps both arms around Harry. This close, Professor Snape's face is all angles, pinched and white with fury. He's no taller than she is now. She's grown this summer, sprouted height as Ron grew bulky and Harry grew taciturn.

"What's going on?" Hermione asks. All she has to do is slide her eyes past Professor Snape's, past the lank hair tucked behind his ear, and look over his shoulder, which wouldn't be enough to keep her from looking if her eyes were on her chin.

"Let me have him," Professor Snape says to her, gesturing for her to shift Harry. He edges her out to take Harry's weight, using his free hand to pry Harry's eyes open to check the pupils. "What a shame; you'll live, Potter," he says.

"Hey!" Ron protests.

There aren't enough professors around the far bed to hide it now. It's Neville, laid out on the bed, or parts of Neville. They don't assemble themselves when Hermione blinks. She can't look away.

"Miss Granger!" Professor Snape says sharply. She jumps and turns her head before she means to, and that's better. Ron's not there anymore. Professor Snape is still supporting Harry, but Madam Pomfrey is helping now, and-- "Don't you dare," Professor Snape snarls, throwing a hand out in her direction when she sways on her feet.

Professor Snape's wrist is bony, even through layers of cloth. They lay Harry down on a bed; Hermione goes with them. She can hear Professor McGonagall and Ron talking out in the hall. She stands with Professor Snape and Headmaster Dumbledore as Madam Pomfrey gives Harry potion for the pain and asks Professor Flitwick for a sleeping charm.

"What happened to Neville?" she asks. No one answers her.

Professor Flitwick casts. Hermione yawns. Then she's slumped in a chair, her head and shoulder resting on Harry's bed as Professor Snape unfolds her fingers from his wrist.

"Neville?" she murmurs, too drowsy with charmed dreams to summon more than a wisp of panic.

"Go back to sleep, Miss Granger," Professor Snape says.

\---

Hermione wakes in the morning with a start from a dream in which she is trying to piece Neville back together, like a puzzle, and failing. She opens her eyes because reality is better when the other option is Neville, reduced to his constituent parts.

The first things she sees is Harry's dark hair. She's curled in bed with him, her arm flung over his ribs and his fingers tangled in hers. The only thing that's missing is Ron at her back, warm and solid along her spine, breathing on her neck. She retreats slowly until she realizes he's still charmed. Then she sits up in relief and stumbles away from the bed. She wants to throw up in the bathroom, but her body won't cooperate. Nothing comes up. Instead, she brushes her teeth and splashes cold water on her face and combs her hair just enough that it won't look so disheveled.

Hermione pages through the pamphlets in the consultation area while she waits for Harry to wake up. "Could I Have Wand Poisoning?" is written in such a patronizing style that she'd almost rather think about her nightmares; "All You Need To Know About Possession (Phantomitis)" doesn't occupy her for more than a few minutes. They all read "A Young Witch or Wizard's Guide to Safe Sex" in third year, but it's the most substantial of the pamphlets, as long as Hermione can block the memories of Neville blushing scarlet before he'd even managed to unfold it. Part of her thinks that most of the practices don't sound particularly safe, that they're just another one of those things they tell teenagers, like "it's better to wait until you're sure" or "until you're married", as indicated, respectively, by her parents and the book the Gryffindor boys keep passing around for its drawings of naked couples. The only part of it that Hermione finds remotely interesting is the part about sex magics. It is still by far the only compelling argument she's heard _in favour_ of sex in general, and even that is mitigated by the bullet list of dangers below it.

Once Harry is awake and insisting that he just wants to go to his first day of classes, Madam Pomfrey sits them both down to talk about trauma, a variation of the talk they've both heard at least once a year. Harry just says, "Fine," when she's nearly done, and that seems to be enough, since it cuts what Hermione thinks could have been five more minutes of lecture down to a vague statement about comfort and bad ideas that seem like good ones at the time.

Madam Pomfrey releases them with strict instructions to speak to a professor about what happened--"within the week, or I'll be forced to take points." Harry balks at that, retreats a step and treads on Hermione's toes. Hermione squeezes his hand in sympathy. This is not something she is going to be able to talk about, either. Hermione keeps seeing bits of Neville every time she closes her eyes. She resigns herself to a fortnight of getting Ron to finish and turn in his homework and of begging extra credit off Professor McGonagall to balance the inevitable loss of house points.

Ron is waiting for them just outside the hospital wing, chewing nervously on his sleeve. He throws an arm over each of their shoulders and musses their hair.

"Gross," Hermione says as the wet wrist of his jumper drags against her neck.

"What are you going to do, faint again?" Ron says fondly. "Feeling better, Harry?"

"Let me alone," Harry mumbles.

Ron gives her a look. She knows this one: it's the "I don't understand; explain this to me " look, which belongs sprawled in front of the common room fire over homework, not here, and not over Harry. This isn't homework; she doesn't have an explanation to give.

"I have to go to the library," Hermione announces, fumbling for something normal to say into the void that follows Harry's voice.

"We'll walk you there," says Ron. "Right, Harry?"

Harry shrugs.

\---

Madame Pince turns the key in the lock to heavy door of the library, hours earlier than the posted closing time. "That should tide you over until morning," she says. "See that I get them back in the same pristine condition. Don't make that face at me, young lady; it'll be good for you to spend your evening somewhere else."

The Gryffindor common room is too loud. There are three separate games of exploding snaps and one charmed paper kamikaze competition going on at once. The dormitory isn't any better. Hermione's room has been turned into a small seance circle of adoring lower form girls; Fay is presiding, with the empty jar of Lavender's face-cream that she uses for scrying. The wide fourth-floor corridor is too cold, and Professor McGonagall left the transfiguration classroom locked. Hermione ends up methodically working her way through the library spellbooks in the dungeon, again. There's nothing on spells that kill by dicing people apart but she already has three feet of parchment. She looks up to find Professor Snape watching her across the workbench, his back straight and arms crossed.

" _Dedlyest Spelles & How to Use Them_," he reads. He nudges the book on the top of the stack disdainfully, exposing the title of the one below it. " _Destroying Your Enemies_. Where's Forsythe's _Companion to Vindictive Spell Use_?"

Hermione points to the pile she's already discarded.

His thin mouth twists at one extremity as though he's considering smiling at her. "Mr Saunders has detention--yes, already. Stay. If you'd like."

When Ron comes to fetch her later, the classroom is full of ordinary sounds. Mr Anthony Saunders is still writing lines, sniffling a little, his pen scraping unevenly every few words. Hermione flinches each time, imagining the blots he must be leaving. Professor Snape is putting up diagrams for tomorrow's potions classes, partially by charm and partially by hand. The tap of the chalk is paired with the jangle of the charms and the familiar bookish sounds of pages turning as he checks the page numbers.

"I thought you'd be up in the library," Ron says, dropping down onto the stool beside Hermione. His hair is sticking up and there's a dark bruise forming on his neck.

"Hickey," Hermione mouths while Professor Snape's back is turned, pointing at her own neck. Ron flushes. He tugs his collar up, covering most of it. "I'm almost done."

"I had to use the you-know-what," Ron says, "to find you."

"You can say 'Marauders' Map' here, Mr Weasley," Professor Snape says, turning towards them and dusting the chalk off his hands. "It would be difficult not to confiscate Mr Potter's toys by accident if I weren't well aware of what they are."

"Mauraders' Map, Mauraders' Map, Mauraders' Map," says Ron with a smirk. He realigns Hermione's stacks of books. "Is he going to tell Pomfrey you're all right, then?"

"He would," he says, "if she were to speak to a professor as instructed. Five points from Gryffindor, Mr Weasley, for lack of respect."

"Seriously?" Ron gripes, piling her books into his arms. "We're already trailing Slytherin after yesterday's opening match. Let's go, Hermione."

"I will relish taking more points, Miss Granger," Professor Snape warns. He sounds delighted with the prospect. Anthony Saunders squeaks and reapplies himself to his punishment. "You're either here or in the library, and Madam Pince assures me she hasn't had a word out of you."

"I can't find which spell it was, the one they used on him," Hermione says, caught somewhere between obedience and defiance.

Professor Snape bares his crooked, yellow teeth and holds the classroom door for them to leave.

"You'd think he killed Neville himself," Ron says in the hallway, "the way he's so eager to talk about it. You're not actually researching it, are you? What's the point?"

"I have to know," Hermione says. "Careful--those are library books."

Ron frowns at her over the volumes stacked up to his chin, gripping them a little more tightly. "Right, you're scary enough when I don't bend the page corners."

\---

Professor Snape is uncharacteristically generous with his interpretation of Madam Pomfrey's instructions: Hermione manages not to lose any points at all during the first month of school. Harry costs them ten. Harry's said nothing to anyone about the first night of school, not even to Hermione. She worries about him. He forgets her birthday and doesn't apologize, which ruins half the pleasure she would have otherwise taken in the taffy candy her parents send--far too much for them to expect her to eat it on her own. They know she'll share it with him and with Ron. When Ron gives half of his portion to Lavender and she hears about it from Parvati, she corners him outside the girls' toilets on the second floor. "Those were yours," she says. "If you'd said you wanted to share with Lavender, I'd have split it into four lots."

"That's not how it works," Ron says.

"You'd both have gotten more," she points out.

He scratches his nose. "But we got the same amount as you and Harry."

"Fractions," Hermione prompts unsuccessfully. When he chews his lip in confusion, she throws up her hands. "Oh, just--nevermind, I don't care."

His voice calling her name follows her into the toilets where she locks herself in a stall and lets herself cry for three minutes, which is just long enough that she's nearly late for History of Magic.

The entire week is unsalvageable. She gets an Acceptable on the ancient runes homework that she does the night Harry has another crippling headache. She sits in the hospital wing beside his bed with three books on curses and hexes and one on magical healing, none of which give her anything to work with. She scribbles out the briefest answers to her runes assignment in the half-hour between breakfast and class while she brushes her teeth. It's the worst assignment she's turned in at Hogwarts, but Ron has turned in parchment rolls that have significantly more errors and still gotten an Exceeds Expectations; it isn't fair.

Lavender invites her to sit with them--Hermione assumes that means Lavender and Parvati and Padma--at the Ravenclaw-Gryffindor game on Friday. It turns out to mean Lavender and Parvati and Sally-Anne Perks, whose inability to tolerate Hermione is only matched by Hermione's lackluster efforts to put up with her, the cow. Lavender chooses a spot in the stands where there's only space for three. "This is what the rest of your life will be like if you ever try to win him over with your horrid sweets again," she says, jabbing Hermione with her forefinger, which sinks ineffectively into Hermione's scarf. Hermione spends the duration of the game in the library, furious.

Because she's avoiding Ron until she can figure out how to apologize to Lavender without sounding guilty, Hermione works on the Universal Base through lunch on Saturday, planning to grab a snack in the afternoon. Mr Filch catches her before she can get into the kitchens and calls her a conniving miscreant. He threatens first to have her whipped until she thinks twice about thieving, then, more seriously, with detention. When she protests, he drags her by the ear back down to the dungeons.

"Look what I caught red-handed," he announces gleefully to Professor Snape, who stands up abruptly but only raises an eyebrow instead of answering. Mr Filch pulls her forward. "You'll make her suffer, won't you?"

"Most assuredly," Professor Snape says.

"Can I watch?"

"Today is Saturday, Filch."

That mysterious argument convinces Mr Filch let go of her ear with a twist that makes her yelp. He shuffles out of the office, stopping only at the door to shake a finger at her: "And don't let me catch you again!"

Professor Snape's expression is full of shadows and impatience. "I'd thought I was free of you for the remainder of the day, Miss Granger."

Hermione fingers her aching ear.

"Don't let him catch you again." It sounds much more like a threat in Professor Snape's deliberately soft voice. Professor Snape stays on his feet, hands resting loosely on the desk, until after Hermione's left and closed the office door behind her.

It's Wednesday before she stops expecting a summons for detention.

\---

When Harry sleeps, he snores. The boys still sneak out of their dormitory under Harry's cloak, which is too small to hide both of them now. They tend to knock her awake with their knees when they climb over her, except when Ron stumbles into Lavender's bed by "mistake". Hermione can't sleep through the night without them there. She doesn't mind Ron elbowing her when he shifts or Harry clutching her so hard he leaves the shape of his bitten-down fingernails in her skin. Whenever they wake her, Hermione goes back to sleep with the sense of _the boys are here; we're all right_ that lasts well into the next morning. Sometimes Ron chews on the corner of her pillow.

It happens less and less often now, with Harry's headaches and nights in the hospital wing. She tosses and turns through the nights alone, counting thestrals, reciting goblin dynasties, staring at the lump of Lavender in the next bed, and turning over only to decide she was more comfortable before. When the boys are there, Harry doesn't want to be touched, and that's fine, until the narrow school bed seems to shrink and they wake each other up scrambling apart. Hermione doesn't know why he comes anymore. Most nights her pillow no longer even smells like his shampoo. She flips and fluffs it but it doesn't help.

She can't figure out how Professor Binns doesn't notice how many times she yawns during his lecture. She's so dazed by the time the lesson ends that she forces herself to snag Lavender on the way out of the classroom.

"What do you want?" Lavender asks, brushing at her sleeve as though Hermione's left crumbs on her shirt when she tapped her.

"You should sit with me for the Defence Against the Dark Arts demonstration next hour," Hermione says.

"What about Ron?"

Lavender has evidently never tried to talk to Ron during class. He either asks questions about what happened five minutes earlier, which keeps Hermione from being able to follow what's happening now, or else he wants to talk about something else entirely, usually quidditch or, more recently, what Lavender thinks about everybody else. If Hermione's stuck between Ron blabbing about quidditch and another predictably boring defence demonstration, she has no chance whatsoever of staying awake. "Yeah, okay," she says. "Ron, too. And maybe Parvati?"

"She's sitting in the back," Lavender says.

The guest professor for the demonstration is Head Auror Robards. Auror Robards isn't old enough to be slow and crusty or too conceited, and Lavender prefaces all of her classroom gossip with a poke, which Hermione was counting on. They sit on the scuffed hardwood floor with the lights dimmed while Auror Robards hexes and dehexes volunteers. Hermione drifts. She refocuses when Lavender pokes her again. Auror Robards is in the middle of a demonstration of the efficiency of different counter-spells on the same curse.

"Have you been taking notes?" Hermione hisses to Harry on her other side. Her own notes, on this section of the demonstration, say only, "Q: How soon to do counter-spell? A: Depends on spell & can be before OR after time T0. Q: What does a Slytherin". They end in a sort of squiggle.

"Yes," Harry says. He glances down at her notes in her lap and grins, then coughs to cover a laugh. Hermione pinches him.

"You can borrow mine later, too," Lavender whispers. "This is more important: blue or violet varnish?" She tugs her left hand out of Ron's and holds out the two smallest fingers.

"Blue." It's almost too dark to tell the difference.

"Okay," says Lavender.

The days blur. Hermione tries to nap in the afternoons, with her head on Harry's thigh or propped against Ron's shoulder, but the boys don't sit still long enough for it to help. She charms a longer parchment for her to-do list, complete with little alarms and blinking alerts to keep her from missing deadlines. She always writes down the important things, but now she's noting every assignment and even the lists of the topics she thinks up during Herbology to research later, even though on Tuesdays, Herbology is her last class of the day.

"That's really annoying," Ron says when the schoolwork alarm goes off as Hermione sits down for breakfast. He reaches around Lavender to grab the plate of bacon. He dumps two slices in front of Hermione, pokes around for the two least fatty slices he can find for Lavender, then forks half of what's left onto his own plate.

"It's useful." Hermione rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands.

"'M glad I don't need one," Ron says around a mouthful of bacon.

"Because you've got Hermione," Lavender says, "which, honestly, is worse."

Ron finishes his glass of pumpkin juice and reaches for Hermione's. "Can I? I bet that was for the History of Magic essay you made me do last night."

"You can have it all. I'll finish Harry's." Harry rarely drinks more than half a glass at breakfast. Hermione pulls the parchment from her bag to see what she missed. Ron's right. The alarm for the essay shouldn't have even rung, except she forgot to cross it off a week ago when she finished adding her footnotes.

"Madam Pomfrey probably won't let Harry out of the hospital wing until after breakfast," Ron says. He drains her pumpkin juice anyway.

\---

Harry wraps his arms around his head as though to protect himself--or to keep his own head from exploding. Hermione watches, hugging herself, as Madam Pomfrey gives him something for the headache. That isn't a headache; something is very wrong.

She can't sleep unless she knows he's still whole and breathing, unless she knows that whatever is coming hasn't happened yet. The halls of Hogwarts are empty; most of the portraits are asleep. Twice, she has to hide--once from Mrs Norris and once from Peeves, who nearly catches her before Mr Filch chases him off with a broom. The hospital wing is quiet and still. No one stops her when she pushes the doors open. No one stops her when she settles on the bed with Harry, fitting herself against him until she can feel him breathing shallowly across her hands. He's too full of potions and charms to wake. Except for the ruffle of breath, it's like sleeping with a ghost.

Madam Pomfrey finds Hermione there when she checks on Harry, and sends her back to bed in Gryffindor tower with a scolding, threatening to take points, night after night.

Hermione spends the earlier parts of most evenings in the potion classroom making half-hearted attempts at the next step of her potion. The first two were easy; now she's stumped and tired. Professor Snape won't tell her what she's doing wrong and this part is boring. The preparation is gross and the brewing is long and unvaried. Professor Snape berates her into a second trial today by gloating about Professor McGonagall's disappointment when Hermione can't get more than sludge out of a simple brewer's base. She's had enough of the brown morass caking her test tubes. She finds herself imagining hurling them at the floor for the petty pleasure of watching them shatter.

Then it happens, almost as real as in her imagination. Hermione stares down at shards of glass and glops of dark splatter smoking faintly from the stone floor.

"Impressive," Professor Snape says, "if crudely done." But then he evanescoes the mess with a murmur and a gesture, never taking his eyes off of her. "Perhaps you want to explain your tantrum before I take points, Miss Granger?"

She shakes her head.

"One point from Gryffindor. Two if you don't immediately assure me that you understand the dangers of unfocused wandless magic."

"That's wandless magic?" It felt like nothing. One moment the test tubes were on their stand, and then two were broken on the floor, the chink of breaking glass as startling as if she'd had nothing to do with it. Using her wand has always been crisp and easy for Hermione, as though she's part of everything she points it at. It doesn't make sense for wandless magic to be--less, somehow.

The corner of his mouth twitches. What Hermione expects to be a smile turns into a deep frown as he says, "That would imply more control than you demonstrated, don't you think?"

"Why is it smoking?"

"Shall I make it three points? An explanation, Miss Granger, if you please. I'm waiting."

"Something's wrong," she says finally, gripping the handle of the latest cauldron of the sludge of failure. Her knuckles whiten. "Very wrong."

"I know," he says, entirely unsympathetic. "Nevertheless, I manage to restrain myself from breaking glassware."

"I don't care," she snaps. "This isn't about the stupid potion--" Hermione stutters to a stop.

Professor Snape waits until it's obvious she isn't going to break the silence to add anything else before he says, waspishly, "That's better."

Hermione hefts the cauldron and hauls it wordlessly over to the sink. She has three to scrub tonight.

\---

"Ron?" Hermione says, rounding the edge of the quidditch stands and then backing up again, her hand over her eyes. "I didn't see that," she calls. "Sorry, but Ron, I need to talk to you!"

She turns her back and stares at the field house until he comes jogging up, pulling his jumper down and patting his hair into place with his tie in his hand.

"You owe me for this," he says, "like, you owe me forever." But he stands still and lets her knot his tie.

"You can snog after the Hallowe'en Feast," Hermione points out.

"Yeah, but if we get caught then, we won't get to go on the Hogsmeade Weekend. Now's better."

"Unless Professor Snape catches you," she says. "Fay said he took points _and_ forbid the Hogsmeade trip to a couple of Hufflepuffs."

"Myth," Ron says. "I asked Hannah in Charms. Do your research, Hermione."

"Okay," Hermione says. "I found something I want you to read. Look." She's begged the book off of Madam Pince, though it's supposed to be a reference book that should never leave the library. She fingers her way to the bookmark and turns the book around for Ron to read, letting it rest on both of her arms.

"Uh," Ron says. He squints. "What language _is_ this?"

"Honestly, Ron. It's a phonetic cypher. Just cast a--nevermind, I'll do it. Hold this." When she's certain he has a good hold of the book, she shakes her wand out of her sleeve and casts a transliteration spell. She takes the book back and holds it so he can read.

It's a passage, recopied from a much older source by a sixteenth-century wizard. It explains the more gruesome techniques of exorcism practiced by traveling healers, as well as the symptoms of the victims susceptible to being aided by the methods he described.

"Okay," says Ron. "That's disgusting. But this bloke spells like I do. Why are you always correcting me?"

"No," Hermione says. "That's just the spell. Doesn't that sound like what's happening to Harry?"

Ron snatches her bookmark and closes the book. "Lots of wizards get migraines. Like Alberic Grunnion, and he even has his own Chocolate Frog Card."

"Harry's headaches are not migraines," Hermione says patiently. "And maybe he's not exactly possessed--"

"We're not going to exorcise Harry," Ron says, pulling her into an awkward hug around the book. "These are the same people who drowned people for justice, right? Tied them to a stone without a wand, and if they drowned before they made a fish or a duck or whatever say they were guilty, then they were innocent but dead?"

"Not exactly," Hermione says into his jumper. He smells like Lavender.

"So they're bad on trials. They're probably bad on copying and history and medicine, too."

"I thought it sounded a lot like Harry's headaches."

Ron lets her go so that he can offer her his little finger for her to hook hers around. "I swear, okay? I swear it doesn't. Harry'll be okay."

"What's okay?" Lavender asks, appearing with not so much as a hair out of place.

"Everything," Ron says; Hermione says, "Nothing."

\---

Ron wakes her up on Hogsmeade morning. She smacks his hand away. "Being awake isn't going to make nine o'clock come any sooner."

"Not Hogsmeade," Ron says. "It's Harry."

Hermione pulls her school robes over her pajamas and skids barefoot down the stairs after Ron, then back up the other side to the boys' dormitory. Dean is trying to hold Harry down. Harry keeps thrashing free. He's sweating and crying and snarling at them to stay away from him.

"Someone get Professor McGonagall," she says.

"She's not in her rooms," Dean says.

"Oh, for Merlin's sake," Hermione snaps. She flips Harry's truck open, upends the box in the upper left corner, and grabs the Map. She touches it with the tip of her wand and speaks the passphrase on the way back downstairs. Professor McGonagall is in the corridor, headed to her office. Hermione runs.

Later, she has to talk Ron into going to Hogsmeade with Lavender anyway. Even after enough Robust Relaxing Remedy to make him sluggish and dull, Harry is fitful whenever anyone comes near him, reacting violently even when Madam Pomfrey helps him lie down. "You can't do him any good here," Hermione tells Ron. "You promised Lavender."

"If I have to go to Hogsmeade, you have to at least get dressed," Ron bargains.

Hermione's hands shake as she dresses. She has to sit down to get her legs untangled from her trousers. Trying to brush her hair makes the tangles worse.

Most of the upper form--third through seventh years--are assembled in the entrance hall. "Come along, Hermione," Professor McGonagall says. "You're late."

"I'm not--" Hermione begins. It's more expedient to lie: "I forgot to get my permission slip signed."

Professor McGonagall frowns at her. "Then I'm afraid you'll have to stay behind."

Madam Pomfrey won't let her back into the hospital ward without a written note from a professor stating that she needs medical attention. Hermione slumps in one of the chairs outside. She has the last library book on curses in her bag; if she reads it and nothing in it helps Harry, she's going to have to find another source for information. She shreds the bottom edge of her notebook cover while she dithers: read or wait?

"Ah, Miss Granger. I thought I might find you here." The Headmaster's voice rings down the corridor as he approaches. Hermione thinks he sounds entirely too jolly for the head of a school with a student still wheezing in the infirmary. "It's Hogsmeade weekend. It won't do to have you sitting all alone while your friends are buying sweets and enjoying the fresh air."

"I'd rather be here," Hermione says.

"Nevertheless, you may not stay where you are. I have a task for you."

"Please, Professor Dumbledore--"

"None of that, dear girl. It'll take your mind off Harry. You've had quite the morning already." When she doesn't move to follow him he taps his wand impatiently against his palm. Her book closes itself and stows itself away in her bag. The schoolbag lifts by its own strap, as if on an invisible hook, and glides to the Headmaster's side. "Come along now."

He floats the bag in front of her like a carrot, stopping to wait at the turns while she catches up.

"With the professors in Hogsmeade, my hands are too full to keep track of everyone on my own. We're short a few prefects, and of course you were one once yourself. Shall I make you a temporary prefect again, just for the day?"

"No," Hermione says.

He fumbles in his pockets. At first he only comes up with an empty wrapper. When he finds what he's looking for he holds it up triumphantly before offering it to Hermione. "Lemon rock? No? It'll make you feel better."

"No thank you, Professor," Hermione says.

"Well, I'll just leave you to them, then." He taps the wall on a staircase landing, cocks his head to listen to something Hermione can't hear, and taps again. A door swings open under his hand. "Ah--before I forget--" Hermione's bag settles gently on her shoulder.

The door shuts behind her, leaving her outside, just down the path from the greenhouses, standing in front of the yard used for recesses. A few of the first and second year students are playing wizarding tag on the grass.

"I'd wondered who'd volunteered," Professor Sprout says, making Hermione jump. "Weeding doesn't wait and I was hoping for someone who could supervise inside. I have two detentions and a group of Ravenclaws playing Oligopoly in the Herbology classroom. Can I trust you to help with homework?"

"I can do that," Hermione agrees.

It galls her that Professor Dumbledore is right: Harry's still on her mind for the rest of the morning, but not in the way that makes her want to chew her nails or glue herself to his bedside in the hospital wing.

\---

Professor Snape is in a good mood that afternoon. He's been away all morning, though not in Hogsmeade. He has his feet propped up on a shipping box of new ingredients and is eating something crunchy out of a paper confectionery bag when Hermione shows up.

"Cutting it close, are you?" he says, setting the bag aside and cleaning his hands with a handkerchief. "Go on; get started. Any later and you won't have enough time to finish before dinner."

Hermione senses, when she's barely three-quarters done, that this will be the batch that comes out perfectly. It's a physical sensation, like a vibration, the magic in her and the magic in the potion rippling along at the same frequency. She doesn't have to check her notes to match the colour. She adds a third pinch of ground beetles to keep the tremor resonating. The instructions merely say, "two pinches, or less than three-and-a-half"; usually she'd go with two, but she can feel it begging for more. The potions instinct fits her like a borrowed shirt, chafing in odd places in the back of her mind. The liquid congeals instantly.

She's out of breath by the time she finishes. The second brewer's base is almost entirely solid. If she wants to use it to make one of the lesser truth serums, she'll have to dissolve it before adding the dandelion root.

Professor Snape leans on his forearms as he inspects the cooling jelly. Hermione stands with her hands on her hips, inordinately proud of herself. "Third--er, fourth?--time's the charm," she says.

He taps it with a knuckle, which makes it jiggle and sets off a shower of sparks inside the beaker. "Rubbish. You've merely run out of ways to ruin this one."

"It's good, then?"

"Isn't it?" There's an undercurrent of something in his voice that warms her, an echo of her own satisfaction.

"Do you think that Harry--," Hermione says, aware of the twist of his shoulders under his buttoned coat. The crease of cloth across his shoulder blades is oddly like Ron's, for all that Ron's not so skinny, when Ron leans over the breakfast table to determine which of the identically-filled glasses has the most pumpkin juice. Professor Snape blinks slowly at her at the sound of her question, lips pinched and brows drawn together over his horribly hooked nose. It's about as neutral of an expression as he ever wears, but she breaks off anyway. "Sorry, Professor," Hermione says. She goes back tidying her workspace.

Harry turns up at dinner, pale but otherwise himself.

\---

Ron glances hastily up and down length of the boys' dormitory before he says anything, like a cartoon character trying to be sly.

"Professor Snape is a spy," he says, panting, having run all the way from Merlin-knows-where to tell them this.

"A spy?" Harry says neutrally, at the same time Hermione says, "Oh, honestly, Ron."

"For You-Know-Who. I just heard him in the potions classroom talking to Draco."

Hermione rolls her eyes. "Ron, talking to Draco doesn't make someone a spy."

"It ought to," Ron complains. "He's a Slytherin. Anyway, they were talking about Morsmodre and how to cast it, and something about a plan."

"What plan?" Hermione demands.

"I didn't stay to listen. Maybe I'm wrong. Can I sit down a minute?" He pulls over Dean's chair so he can join them at Harry's desk. "Is that our charms homework? Can I copy it?"

"No," says Harry. And then, because Harry is having a good day, he says, "We could go back down to the dungeons and see if we can learn anything else."

Draco is still in the classroom talking to Professor Snape when they get there, but they can't make much out. There's some jostling between them outside the door ("You go." "No, you go." "No, he hates you less.") before Hermione says, exasperated, "Do you want them to hear us?" and knocks before letting herself in.

"Granger," Draco says to her, almost politely, despite the fact that her entrance has cut off whatever he was saying.

"Malfoy," she says, looking up at him. "Professor, I didn't realize--I'll come back later."

"Certainly," Professor Snape says. He reaches back and plucks a folded piece of parchment off his desk and holds it out to her gingerly between two long, stained fingers. "I believe this is yours."

Hermione has a flash of memory of tucking her to-do list into a notebook that morning. "It was in my potion notes," she says.

"Correct." He lets her snatch it before dropping his hand. "Shall I give you detention for interrupting?" The question is mild, with only a current of mistrust. He and Malfoy are clearly waiting for her to leave.

Hermione glances down at her shoes. She shuffles through possible lies to tell before settling on a pair of partial truths. "I wanted to talk to you. Professor McGonagall said I should try to talk to someone..."

Professor Snape scowls at her. "Will it keep for half an hour?"

"Yes," she says.

"You may tell your friends I haven't warded my classroom against them." He makes a little shooing motion with his hand. Draco snickers.

Harry and Ron propel her a safe distance down the hallway before the interrogation starts.

"Were they in Death Eater masks?" Ron asks.

"What did he give you?" Harry demands.

"Does this mean we still have to go to potions class tomorrow?"

Hermione unfolds the parchment for Harry to see. "It's my to-do list," she says.

Professor Snape has annotated it. "This isn't due until next Friday," he's added next to her arithmancy assignment, and "oh?" beside her note to prepare for the next astronomy class, and he's right because it's just supposed to be an observation session. There's a "this hasn't even been assigned yet," next to her potions homework. In the list of books that looked likely to help with the spell used on Neville, he's scratched out several titles ("shameful waste of trees") and circled one ("this one will be of no use, but read it if you haven't"). Further down, he's corrected "look up bundling" to read "look up advanced stirring techniques (bundling will come later)" and replaced "try the Extension Charm" with "try the Undetectable Extension Charm".

Hermione meets Harry's eyes, a little guiltily, aware of exactly how bad this is. She clenches her fingers to quash the impulse to write, "find out if Professor Snape is really a spy". She borrows a quill from Harry and adds one last item: "Stop writing things down."

\---

Half an hour later, she has the most uncomfortable conversation with Professor Snape.

She opens with, "I can't sleep," because that's what they've decided will be her excuse; Ron thinks it sounds realistic. It feels so good to say it that before she can stop herself she barrels on into, "and Lavender still thinks I'd steal her boyfriend if I could and something's going on with Harry and Ron thinks you're a spy."

"If that's all," Professor Snape says, sounding maddeningly indifferent, "do you remember how to brew Dreamless Sleep?"

"I--that's one of the potions the Universal Base accepts--I mean, yes," Hermione says. "In theory. From the Universal Base you have to add hellebore and wormwood. Isn't that strange? The wormwood is part of the base when you brew it normally, which is why it's usually considered an advanced potion. Well, and the wand work."

"I'm aware," Professor Snape says dryly. "Fetch the ingredients, Miss Granger, with less prattle, please."

Except he doesn't let her stop prattling. He leans on the workstation and makes her talk through the brewing steps while she sets out the ingredients and the receptacles for combining and measuring. She embarrasses herself by paraphrasing his classroom lecture from last week on the importance of accurate timing when brewing advanced potions as she prepares the cauldron and the stirring rods. He asks, as she's measuring out dried sprigs of lavender, why Dreamless Sleep is an effective drought. The rhythm of speech she's built up carries her through into quoting his explanation last year when they discussed it in class. She flushes.

"I can't find the spell they used on--him," she says, desperate enough to change the topic that she's willing to bring up Neville. "I saw spell damage, but--and I've looked everywhere."

"Is there truly a spell for turning a hedgehog into a pincushion?"

"Oh, damn it," Hermione says as she spills the octopus powder and has to clean the scale before she can start measuring again. "We learnt one in Transfiguration, but it's not so much a spell as a whole--" delicate and fascinating balance of commands and intent, all joined up elegantly into an infuriatingly precise casting "--thing."

"And for pouring tea?"

"Well, there must be," Hermione reasons. "Witches and wizards would do it by hand, otherwise. There's too much lifting and carrying and steadying and pouring and setting back down for most people--and wouldn't there have to be a heat-resistance charm?"

Professor Snape summons a tea-set, checks to be sure there's still tea in the pot, and demonstrates. It's a concise little spell, resulting in a perfectly-poured cup of cold tea, which he drinks.

"Oh, do that again," Hermione says, curious and enchanted.

"I'm distracting you enough as it is. Kindly take care with my lacewings."

The lacewings are in no danger; she frowns at him, then at them, then at him again. "Is there a difference between pouring lacewings and pouring tea?"

"What do you think?"

There must be--of course there is. It's obvious when she shakes the lacewings out by hand. Each receptacle and each material must be poured differently. Professor Snape makes her say it, then he makes her talk her way through the differences between cutting ingredients and separating parts. Hermione can almost see how spells are put together, just from that, but she can also still see Neville's body on the hospital bed dripping blood on the floor. Her hands are shaking so hard that she can't continue the potion, sloshing the brine solution for the pickled scarab beetles on her fingers when she moves the jar.

Professor Snape stands there, hard-faced, the empty tea-cup dangling from his fingers, and she hates him, hates him, when he says, "Calm yourself, or you'll contaminate the potion. Don't think I won't make you start over." Then, "Give me the stirring rod. There. Now you have thirty-eight seconds to wash your hands. Thirty-seven. Move, Miss Granger, or you'll be--thirty-six--late with the lacewings."

When she's rinsed her hands and added the lacewings, he starts again: "You won't get to potions wand work until spring term, but I know your penchant for dangerous experiments. How much have you been attempting behind my back?"

Hermione isn't stupid. Wand work can go spectacularly wrong.

"None," she says, a little too curtly. She dusts the last of the shrivelfig into the cauldron and watches the texture change.

"Step aside." Professor Snape rolls his wand sleeve up. He begins the next step with a shower of incandescence over the cauldron. "Did you think that was an unwarranted question?"

Hermione thinks about it, wearily. She has been dying to see potions wand work for years. She's a little worried that if she doesn't give the right answer, he'll tell her to leave. "Because you know I'm not that reckless?"

"Do I?"

The colours dripping from his wand fade. Hermione recognizes the repeated flick-and-glide wand-waving that was so hard to get right last year for the Cat Nap Charm.

Professor Snape sighs. He traces an intricate knot just above the surface; the potion surges to follows the point of his wand. "I have many duties, and I take all of them seriously. Among other things, I am also your teacher and your guardian while you attend this school. Does that satisfy you?"

She's not his job, though. Hermione knows the limits of her abilities, and she's careful. Reasonable. With Harry and Ron, somebody has to be the responsible one. She resents the implication that she's not. "All anyone ever says is 'don't, it's too dangerous'. There are things I need to know. You can't just--forbid me."

"No," he says. "I didn't." He blows a word she doesn't catch across the top of the simmering potion and cuts the flame. He ladles a steaming dose into a vial. "For tonight. There will be nine more--but not less than three days apart, and you must come and ask for them. I'll tell Madam Pomfrey myself, so don't think you can cheat by going to her."

"Is it safe?" They say Dreamless Sleep is addictive. She wants to be certain.

He huffs. "Why do you think you're the one who did the brewing?" Because he was testing her? Teaching her? She shudders. He bottles the rest of the potion while she watches, sealing each vial with red wax and holding it out to her for to place her thumbprint on the seal. It's Master Mercutio's Safe Seal wax; there's a puff of scentless smoke as she presses her thumb to the warm wax. She'll be the only one who can open them without breaking the bottles.

She still wants an answer. "I meant--ten doses?"

"What did I just say about my obligations?"

Ron's waiting for her at the door. "I didn't know you were actually having trouble sleeping," he says. He looks faintly guilty.

\---

"Is that for Transfiguration?" Harry whispers, folding his long legs under the library table where she's working, careful not to touch her even when he leans over into her light. It's not. She did this week's Transfiguration homework last month.

"It's a wand-motion diagram," she says, "for a shelving spell I'm making."

"Shelving spells already exist," Harry reminds her.

"That's not the point." The point is to understand how the pieces fit together: the incantation and the motions and the series of chained spells. It's very complicated, but there are patterns. Understanding them is the first step to understanding what happened to Neville.

"But guess what. Snape's not--"

"Professor Snape," Hermione corrects out of habit, only half-listening. She's taking two sets of notes: how to make spells, and how to make their counterspells. She's on the brink of something.

"Whatever," Harry says. "He's not the spy. He's just a Death Eater."

"Harry!"

"He is, though."

And that's all he'll say about it. Harry won't tell her who the spy is, and he won't say how he knows about Professor Snape. He hasn't told Ron, either. It makes Hermione nervous; Harry is rotten at keeping secrets for more than a few hours. Even the glum, taciturn Harry that their Harry has become spills his secrets to one or both of them.

Hermione writes to her dad about it, couching the story in hypotheticals and vague and hopefully misleading terms ("bully" for "Death Eater" doesn't begin to cover it). He answers her letter the same afternoon but of course Hermione doesn't get the envelope until the post is delivered at breakfast the next morning. He's written two lines in printed capital letters that make her feel safe: "Hmm, sounds like forewarned is forearmed. Say hi to Ron and Harry from us and don't forget to floss. Love, Dad."

\---

"It doesn't work," Ron says.

"It would if you'd do it right," Hermione tells him. "It's flick, flick, swish, not flick, flap, swish. Try again. I want to test the counterspell."

"Hermione," says Harry, "it's not flick, flick, swish. It's more flip, flick, swish. Like this, right?"

Hermione observes him critically. "Almost. Do that again."

He does, and that's it; that's right. That's what she's been trying to teach them for nearly two days of free hours and after dinner coaching sessions.

"Flip, flick, swish," Harry says, nodding. "Is it even possible to flick twice in a row? That's what's throwing Ron."

"Yeah," says Ron, and waves his wand in flap, flap, swish. "No, wait." Flap, flip, swish. "Don't say it, Harry."

Hermione takes pity on him. "Let it rest. Now the incantation: _Armarioris_."

By the time they try to put the two together, Harry can't say the incantation without laughing on the drawn-out O, so it's Ron who gets it to work first. Hermione ducks out of the trajectory of her runes textbook from the floor to her shelf. As soon as she straightens, she casts the counter-spell. The three of them stare expectantly at the bookshelf. Nothing happens.

"You try it, Ron." It works for her when she's the one who casts the original spell. She's tested it thoroughly. She doesn't have to stand in the same place, or wear the same clothes. The only limit she has to undo her own spell is time: forty-and-one-half seconds. She only recruited Harry and Ron once she was sure of the parameters.

Ron stumbles over the counter-spell's incantation and twirls his wand like a duelist. The book doesn't budge. "It's no use," he says, and gamely pulling it off the shelf for another trial, which produces exactly the same results.

"Why is that so much harder than a normal shelving spell?" Ron asks, bending to brace his hands on his knees for a moment. He's breathing heavily. "And it only shelves one book at a time."

"Noether's second theorem of spell theory," Hermione says, "implies that the total energy required to perform a spell can be reduced by increasing the number of symmetrical--" Ron and Harry are both staring at her as though she's speaking Goblin. "Okay, I couldn't figure that out, so it's like you're doing a whole bunch of little spells, all at once."

Ron nods sagely. "That Noether bloke knew his stuff."

"Her stuff," Hermione says.

Harry eventually manages to get the book on and off the shelf, and Ron can shelve single volumes like the best of them by the time they are too exhausted to continue. None of them have managed to unshelve a book shelved by someone else, and when they shelve simultaneously, Harry and Hermione's counter-spells both work, but only on the book the caster shelved.

"I don't know what I did wrong," Hermione admits, flinging her arms out and staring at the cracks in the ceiling. They're all sprawled on the floor. It takes too much energy to sit.

"Bollocks," Ron slurs as though the effort to open and close his mouth is beyond him at the moment. "Y'wrote an actual spell."

"Two," says Harry.

"But--"

"You're _brilliant_ ," says Ron.

\---

After an hour of Harry whimpering in the hospital wing, his scar burning hot enough that she can feel the heat without actually touching his face, Madam Pomfrey sends Hermione down to fetch a burn paste from Professor Snape. Hermione snaps _Magick Moste Evil_ closed without bothering to use a bookmark. She hasn't made it past the introduction. She keeps glancing up at the blistering skin on Harry's forehead and losing her place.

Madam Pomfrey must floo Professor Snape before Hermione gets there; it's just after three o'clock in the morning, but he's wide awake and doing up the last buttons under his chin when he opens the door, a fire blazing in the grate behind him.

"Burn paste?" she says, and he holds up a labeled tin. "He's making the worst sounds."

He glares at her. "He isn't doing it to annoy you."

"I know that, Professor."

He barely tolerates her now. He's been avoiding her, inexplicably busy in the evenings and afternoons since she told him they thought he was a spy. She's taken to avoiding the dungeons except when absolutely necessary: four times a week for potions class, and once every three or four evenings for a dose of Dreamless Sleep. The way back to the hospital wing is painfully and awkwardly silent. Hermione casts about for something to say. She finally comes up with a question from her reading earlier: "Do you know anything about horcruxes?" She's not sure if she's pronouncing it right.

At first she thinks he's ignoring her; they're three more moving stairways up before he says, "In the morning, I'd like you to come with me to see Professor McGonagall."

"Am I in trouble?"

"No. You're--" Professor Snape hesitates. "Not in trouble," he says testily.

The burn paste cools Harry's skin, but doesn't relax him. Hermione sits with him until after seven while he thrashes and moans and sometimes screams.

\---

"Severus," says Professor McGonagall with the same slightly-censorious surprise and concern she turns on a crying Gryffindor. It's unnatural to see that directed at Professor Snape. "How long have you been awake, my boy?"

"Immaterial," Professor Snape says. "I've brought a friend: Minnie, Miss Granger."

Professor McGonagall adjusts her glasses and smooths her robes. Hermione recognizes the gesture. Her mum uses it to hide awkwardness, or to buy time. "Come in, both of you. Hermione, will you make tea while I speak to Professor Snape for a moment?"

Hermione nods. All she hears is Professor McGonagall's, "Severus, what on Earth are you thinking?" and Professor Snape's, "You don't know what she--" before one of them throws up a Privacy Charm. She busies herself with the tea set and Professor McGonagall's company breakfast tea. It infuses for three full minutes before she hears the Privacy Charm pop. When she turns around, it's to find Professor Snape--undressing--though he's only shucked his robes and is unbuttoning his left coat-sleeve. The white cuff of his shirt is fascinating. The pale skin under it when he rolls it back is terrifying.

Professor McGonagall draws her into the protective curve of one arm. The fringe at the edge of her tartan wrap slips over Hermione's shoulder.

Professor Snape settles his sleeve above his elbow. The Mark writhes under the dark hair and white skin of his forearm. Hermione's first instinct is to back away. He holds out his arm so that she can inspect it without stepping away from Professor McGonagall. "Would you rather hear what I have to say from your own Head of House?"

"No," Hermione says. Harry was right--she's never loved him so fiercely, never felt so grateful for the warning--

The death's head grins at her, ugly and cold; the snake slithers out of one of the eyeholes. It flicks its tongue. Hermione fixes her eyes on the corner of the gilt frame of one of the pictures on the wall instead.

"Why don't you sit?" Professor McGonagall says gently.

"I'd rather stand," Hermione says.

They're waiting for her, though, so eventually she sits. The slightly-lumpy seat cushion is familiar; she's in here maybe once a week to discuss her schedule or borrow books. Usually Professor McGonagall sits in the second chair and drinks her tea with perfect posture while Hermione tries to work out whether or not it would be impolite to cross her legs.

She has to look up at both professors now, but it would be rude to stand again. She's relieved when Professor Snape smooths both his shirt- and coat-sleeves back down to his wrist and sits across from her, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees.

"Tell me what I am," Professor Snape says in a voice that doesn't really allow her the option to decline.

"You're--" Hermione looks to Professor McGonagall for a clue and gets nothing. The room is no help, either: the mismatched chintz, the paired upholstered chairs, the highland landscapes on the walls, the red-and-gold curtained windows. It's all wrong; she doesn't feel safe here, Professor McGonagall doesn't comfort her. She focuses on Professor Snape's nose. The first time she had a student-teacher conference with him it was the other way 'round: she met his eyes to avoid staring at his nose. "You fixed my to-do list," she hedges.

Professor McGonagall frowns at her. Professor Snape's mouth tightens. "And?" he asks.

"And you know something is wrong," she says, clinging to things she's sure of. Can he still be a spy if Professor McGonagall knows he has a Dark Mark?

"Harry Potter is not going to get better," Professor Snape says abruptly. "He's going to get much worse."

"Severus!" Professor McGonagall objects. "If that's the best you can do, then let me handle this."

"Ron," Hermione says. "Does Ron know?"

"There's no reason to worry yet, Hermione," Professor McGonagall assures her.

"Not worry?" Hermione parrots, numbly. Her brain catches up. "Why are you telling me and not Ron?"

The professors share an unreadable look. Professor McGonagall breaks first: "Neither of us wants this to be worse for you than it has to be. Professor Snape thinks you're going to jump to conclusions."

"Correct conclusions," Professor Snape says. Hermione bristles at the tone even though he's glaring up at her Head of House.

"This is about the horcruxes," Hermione says flatly.

"Horcrux," says Professor Snape in his teaching voice. "A simulacrum, an object infused with part of Voldemort's soul. You call it Harry Potter."

"That's not true!"

"I was there," Professor Snape says. "Do you want to check my memories?"

Hermione really doesn't. "It's not true. Harry's a person--Harry's my friend."

His puts a hand over hers. His fingers are warm and she doesn't mind; it's his right hand. His yellow nails look flat and sick against her own skin. "He is, yes."

"Severus," Professor McGonagall warns.

He withdraws his hand, sits back, does up the many buttons of his coat-sleeve one-handed. "The Headmaster will use him to win this war." He's looking at his sleeve, disinterested. "Either by letting him die or by killing him in order to weaken Voldemort."

"I won't let him," Hermione says, standing up. "You won't either. You said--and he's a student in your care."

"What if I lied?"

"No one has lied to you, Hermione. I'll vouch for him myself. Severus, stop this."

Professor Snape smiles at her as Professor McGonagall propels her towards the door. It's not a real smile. It's a stretch of muscles that means something, but Hermione doesn't know what. She drags her feet--she's certain he hasn't lied. She doesn't want to be certain. It's herself she mistrusts.

"Professor Snape is exaggerating. Try not to take it to heart. I want you to take a four drops of this and spend today in bed," Professor McGonagall says, handing her a tiny stoppered vial. "And come see me if you need anything. You'll be all right, dear."

\---

Hermione is not all right, and she doesn't take any of the potion. It's milky white: Drought of Peace, Hermione thinks. There's the distinctive sweet smell of valerian when she loosens the stopper. That's right, too, but Hermione also remembers, during her potions final exam first year, thinking it strange that the valarian she was adding to the Forgetfulness Potion smelled the same as the herbal tea her grandfather drank for his nerves, remembers promising herself while stirring (three times, clockwise) that she'd never touch her grandfather's tea, ever. Her mum had stopped going to visit him before he died; it was too hard, Hermione's mum said, when he didn't even recognize her any longer.

She sits on the sofa in the common room while everyone else is at class and picks at the loose threads in the cushions until Ron stumbles through the portrait hole mid-morning, frowning in confusion.

"Snape threw me out of class," Ron complains. He squeezes himself into the too-narrow space between her and the nearer of the sofa's arms. "I swear, I didn't even do anything."

"Did he give you detention?" Hermione asks.

"That's the weird thing," Ron says. "Why are you sitting here alone? Dean's got a tummy thing, too.--I know! Infect me, come on."

Hermione tries to stop a laugh, but it comes out as a snort.

"Sneeze on me or something. I want to skip classes for the rest of the day."

"What about Harry?"

"If he's feeling okay, I say we could at least get a butterbeer in Hogsmeade before we get caught. Please? This term's been boring."

All Hermione has to do is slide down a bit to lean on him more comfortably and pretend she's thinking about sneaking out to Hogsmeade.

Ron heaves such a sigh that she can feel it rock her. He pats her hair; Hermione hopes he's washed his hands or later she's going to be picking out flakes of shell from the runespoor eggs from today's potions class. "Sorry, I forgot you're sick for real."

She can't make herself open her mouth to tell him the truth.

\---

Hermione forces herself to go back to studying in the dungeon and working on the Universal Base, though without enthusiasm. Ron can't miss any more class or he's not going to pass. If that means she needs to let Professor Snape keep an eye on her, she'll do it.

The first time she returns to the dungeon outside of class, she arms herself with a request. If he sends her away, she can pretend he doesn't want to help her, rather than doesn't want to see her. He's in his office marking essays--she can see the slashes of red ink even from the door.

"What do you want?" he asks after she's been hovering in the doorway for a few moments.

"A book on curses," Hermione says succinctly, determined not to annoy him with long-winded answers.

"I believe there's still a wing of the library dedicated to the subject. Importune Madam Pince if you must." He bends his head back to his work and scribbles another failing grade--the Dreadful is so large as to be unmistakable even from a distance.

"I read all of them already," says Hermione.

Professor Snape sets his quill down carefully. "I suppose I ought not to be surprised. Are you asking if I have books on spurious topics that you might borrow?"

Hermione grips the strap of her schoolbag more tightly. "I--not exactly. Do you? That is, I don't want to curse anyone."

He moves to stand in front of the bookshelves. He shifts a few jars out of the way in order to be able to skim his finger across the titles on the top shelf. "Is this about Potter?"

"Professor?"

"Answer the question," he snaps. "Or I'll find you the driest, most senseless drivel I can pull off this shelf. And give yourself credit for a modicum of sense: if you thought borrowing a book from me could hurt him, you wouldn't have come."

"I _am_ a Gryffindor," Hermione says.

"You're a plague," he says, short-tempered. "Perhaps 'sense' was a bit of an exaggeration. Do you want bedtime reading, or do you want my help?"

"It's for Harry," she says, clipping the words as dourly as he does.

Professor Snape selects a thin blue volume. "Try this grimoire, then. You want Dark Arts, not curses. And this" --a thicker leather-bound book that doesn't quite lay flat in his hands-- "for background reading. You'll take neither out of my presence. I'll not risk the Headmaster confiscating them as inappropriate material."

Hermione nods. "What if I have questions?"

He blinks at her, as though surprised. "I suppose you could ask Minnie, but if you start asking her about Dark practices, she'll come straight to me."

It takes Hermione a moment to remember that Minnie is Professor McGonagall. "I don't think Professor McGonagall would like it if she knew I was reading Dark books any more than the Headmaster would."

"I hadn't planned to tell her," Professor Snape says.

Hermione cringes when she flips through the books in the classroom, her feet tucked up under her and her bag spilling its contents across the top of the student desk she's claimed. They're only books, but Professor Snape is worse than Ron. The leather-bound book curls with water damage; its frontpiece is coming unglued. The spine on the blue book is cracked. Most of the pages in both books have been dog-eared at one time or another, and he's written all over them, sometimes directly over the text. There are light rings from mug bottoms on some of the pages, and potions splatter on others. Hermione takes notes in _note_ books.

Neither is very long nor particularly difficult--nor Dark, at that--, but it's enough to keep her busy for the fortnight until she goes home for Christmas.


	2. Interlude: Winter Holidays

Stepping off the train and through the barrier between the magical and muggle stations always makes Hermione shudder, as though she's stepping out of her skin and leaving a part of herself behind. Her mum and dad are waiting for her with a muggle coat to replace her cloak and a potted red poinsettia in full bloom.

"You didn't write me about your end-of-term exams," her dad says after the flurry of hugs and kisses and the exchange of winter outerwear. He draws her arm through his.

Hermione distantly recalls sitting them, two days of scribbling against the clock, the bite of fury in the middle of Professor Vector's when Hermione realized it was a Neverending Exam, that no matter how fast she wrote she wouldn't complete it. She knew she only needed three correct problems to pass, and she'd finished that in the first ten minutes. It was a waste of the time that would have been better spent with Professor Snape's books in the dungeon, sifting for the rare references to horcruxes.

"They were a doss," she says, skipping the details.

"That's my girl," he tells her. He opens the car door for her the way he does for her mum. "But I figured I'd better ask before we take you out to dinner to celebrate."

Her mum's switched practices again, to a little clinic in Kentish Town, closer to home along the Northern line, and her dad's finally lost Mr Clarke to cancer after all these years, which is a terrible thing to celebrate. They do it anyway because Mr Clarke was a terrible patient who upbraided Hermione's dad on the visits when he didn't bite him.

Her mum drives them home because her dad's had half a bottle of wine with dinner. She turns off the main roads to show Hermione everything that's changed: here the borough is finally repairing the pavement; the house on Bedford Drive that Hermione's mum has always admired has painted their front door and their gate an atrocious shade of pink; the primary school where Hermione learnt to read has put up a darling Christmas tree that Hermione can't see from the road in the dark. The school looks tiny to her now, as though someone hit it with a Shrinking Spell while she was away.

"What about the art gallery that opened in Finchley?" her mum asks. "It's a bit of a detour, but you know we don't mind driving you about."

"I saw it this summer, Mum," Hermione says with a yawn, "before I went to school."

\---

It's worse, somehow, lying in her own bed in her parents' house and listening to the murmur of their voices in the next room as they talk before going to sleep. She shivers under the quilt and stares at the glowing constellations her dad helped her stick to the ceiling when she was seven, faithful to the real ones, the ones he encouraged her to stay up to marvel at on their family camping trips. Caph, the second star in Cassiopeia, had fallen down later and was replaced with a paper star she can barely make out in the dark. The house creaks as it settles. The shuffle of her new owl, her days-early Christmas present from her parents, along its perch sends shivers down Hermione's spine. The radiators groan. Her room faces the street; whenever a car passes, light shifts across the wall.

She keeps her eyes open as long as she can. Closing them feels like suffocating. When she succumbs to sleep, early in the morning, she dreams. When she dreams she wakes her parents and herself and claims she shrieked because thought she saw a mouse.

The third night it's so bad that she gets up and wanders the house until her dad appears in a bathrobe, brandishing a broom. He laughs softly when he sees her.

"I thought you were the neighbour's damned cat again. He got into the kitchen last week. Go on to bed now, honey, or you'll be tired tomorrow and we promised the Joneses we'd be there for dinner. It won't do to fall asleep in the soup." It's a joke; Hermione's dad says the Joneses are the most boring family in England, but they go anyway because Hermione's mum did her dentistry residence with Mrs Jones. Hermione's dad's the one who fell asleep in the Joneses' sitting room two years ago.

Hermione waits until she's sure he's gone back to sleep before she clicks her desk lamp on. She writes a note with a regular ball-point pen on cheap square-lined notebook paper and sends it with her Christmas-present owl to Professor Snape asking for a dose of Dreamless Sleep. He sends it back immediately with her owl. Hermione's own thumbprint is pressed into the unbroken seal; a tag around the neck of the vial with his sharp, narrow handwriting announces, "Last one, Miss Granger."

Last one until when? she wonders. Last one forever?

She sleeps until just past noon, drugged into dreamless bliss, and shrugs off her mum's teasing about teenagers sleeping like the dead.

\---

Hermione helps her dad set up the tree and her mum stuff the goose for just the three of them. Her parents are only children, who married early and had Hermione late. Of all her grandparents, Hermione only remembers one grandfather, the one who grew chives in a tin planter in his kitchen and drank valerian tea. There are no presents to wrap; her parents always give each other a fancy dinner date, and the shopgirl at Flourish & Blott's did up ones Hermione bought for her parents, Harry, and Ron. "Now that you're all grown up," Hermione mum says, "we know you won't mind that your owl wasn't something we could put under the tree."

Christmas in the Granger household is quiet: a classic film on the telly, the baskets for the London Mobile Christmas Service, Handel's Messiah. This year her dad finally bought a CD; it's a different version--no longer the eternal St Martin in the Fields under Sir Neville Marriner, but a newer recording by the Stockholm something-or-other. Hermione's mum accuses her dad of failing England, looking for his Christmas music elsewhere. It's not the same. Hermione's a traitor for preferring the new one.

At night, when she wakes again and again, she writes notes to Harry that go unanswered and missives to Ron that, the next morning, don't fit in envelopes. The second thing she sends to Professor Snape with her owl is a draft of a new counter-spell. She worries for the next sixteen hours that she shouldn't have done, but he must like her a little bit because he owls it back together with a book on incantations. He's circled or scratched her errors out with scathing remarks, corrected her Latin, and scribbled rambling comments on theory that she doesn't really understand in and around her wand diagrams. He's spent time on it, possibly more than she did.

Hermione imagines Professor Snape sitting alone at Hogwarts marking exams on Christmas Eve, with so little to occupy him that he's pleased to see her owl arrive. It's a silly thought; she knows nothing about him. He must have family somewhere, and if he doesn't, he surely has friends. Still, she spends the rest of the holidays writing him notes that she never intends to send. Most of them ask for Dreamless Sleep or complain about how her parents' world feels so small and limited: they rarely stray from their practices, the neighbourhood, the circle of friends they've had since university. In the muggle world it's easy to wad up the paper and toss it in the wastebasket, but Hermione burns them all over the lumpy clay bowl she made and glazed when she was six, striking match after match until the edges of the paper crumble.

"Your homework can wait, darling," her mum says when she catches Hermione awake after midnight with the incantation book open and her desk lamp on. "You haven't been yourself, up at all hours."

"This is important," Hermione says.

Her mum sits on the edge of Hermione's bed and smooths the fold of the turned-down quilt. "Do you want to tell me about it?"

"It's about about spell development," she says, turning the book towards her mum. She tries not to lie to her parents, though she can never tell anymore what they accept as true and what think she's making up. The left-hand page has a diagram of the places of articulation of Latin consonants.

"Looks like something that will keep until tomorrow morning," her mum says, leaning forward to press a kiss to the top of Hermione's head. "I'm glad you you never cut this off," she says, apropos of nothing. "You have your father's lovely wild hair. Lights out, miss."

It doesn't make much of a difference. Without the desk lamp, she can't read, but there's enough moonlight for her to finally get the Undetectable Extension Charm to stick after it ate a hole through her favourite faux-leather purse and unraveled the exterior pocket of her schoolbag. It works just fine on her beaded handbag, though she doesn't know what she's done differently. She slips the drawstrings over her wrist and wears it everywhere, though at the moment there's nothing in it but a change of clothes, her toiletries, Professor Snape's book, and new box of matches that she nicked from the cupboard in the bathroom.

She waits for her parents to ask what's wrong, to take her to see someone--Hermione knows her mum's been seeing a psychologist for years, since the last miscarriage, so it's not like they won't know how to find a shrink--, to insist she not go back to school, or that she take a note back to school that says she has to talk to a counselor, anything. They don't. Her dad kisses her temple like always when he sits down to dinner and her mum still tells her to brush her teeth when Hermione goes up to get dressed after breakfast. She knows they worry about her in between, but they don't do anything.

It makes her angry until she realizes that they don't do anything because they can't. It makes her shudder to think of her parents up against a dementor. She begged for a new bathing suit and stopped wearing half of her summer tops after the Department of Mysteries, which they don't know about; they've never seen her scar. They don't know about thestrals--Hermione isn't even certain her dad would know if there were one in front of him. They certainly don't know about Neville. Hermione cries into her pillow as quietly as she can, because if she can hear her parents talking, they can hear her. She doesn't want them to worry; she wants them to be happy thinking she's happy and go about their lives. Even if they're all pretending.

\---

By the time the holidays are over she's learned to wake herself before the worst of it, to lie in bed while her heartbeat thrums through her, too fast, to look over at the clock and see that it's only been twenty minutes since the last nightmare. She's learned that if she's tired enough she can trick herself into sleep by wrapping her own arms around herself. In between, she lies there with her eyes open and thinks of Neville and Harry and horcruxes and spell theory.

"If it's a boy you're fretting over," her mum says seriously, pulling her in for a hug--

"--or a girl," her dad says. "You know we wouldn't mind if it were a girl--"

"--yes, if that's what it is, darling, it'll pass. I know it sounds silly now, but you'll see. Just be safe." Her mum uses the hug as cover to slip a strip of condoms into her pocket, and misses, partially; they hang like a silver tail.

Hermione is startled into a laugh. She's in her school robes and cloak and cap already, standing on the just-shoveled driveway feeling ridiculous, like an actor dressed up for a play she wants no part in. They're supposed to be driving her up to the station, not trying to talk to her about sex outside where the neighbours are probably listening. In Mrs Cotter's front room window, the curtain shifts. "Oh, honestly," Hermione says. "Please stop embarrassing me."


	3. Winter Term

Harry's already in the hospital wing with a headache when Hermione gets back to school. She and Ron go to see him, only to find Professor McGonagall and Professor Dumbledore already there. Harry's leaning over the side of a bed retching black bile onto the floor, which brings Madam Pomfrey running, followed by a house-elf with a rag.

"Perhaps you should wait outside," Professor Dumbledore suggests gently, crushing his hat in his hands as he observes them.

There are chairs in the hall, for the squeamish, Ron usually says, but he has no problem using them now, sitting on one and bracing his feet against another. He sticks his tongue out at her when she tells him not to put his feet on the chairs, and starts in on a story of what new items from the joke shop his mum has banned this year. It's as though he's afraid of silence if he stops talking.

Hermione gets that. She's not going to close her eyes at all tonight now; she knows what she'll see, only this time it will be Harry in pieces on the hospital bed dripping blood on the floor. Sometimes avoidance works best.

"Was Harry with you, before the Sorting?" Hermione asks when Ron finishes listing all of the gifts that were exchanged in the Weasley household and explaining the superiority of his new quidditch pads.

"When?" Ron says, as though he can't place the Sorting.

"The Sorting," Hermione says. "Where the Hat sings and sorts the first years at the beginning of every year? The Sorting. Was Harry with you before it?"

"Uh." Ron chews on the collar of his new jumper as he thinks. "I don't remember. Weren't we together?"

"No," Hermione reminds him. "I went up to the girls' dormitory because I wanted to make sure I had enough space for my books before the girls decided to make a beauty corner with the shelves, like last year. Remember? You said you'd distract Lavender for me."

"Oh--oh, yeah," Ron says. "You know the little nook behind that tapestry on the way to the astronomy tower?"

"So Harry wasn't with you."

"Er, no. I love Harry, too, but Lav might--hey, I didn't show you what she got me." Ron pulls up his trouser hem to show her his socks. "They change color when they're dirty."

"Ron," Hermione says.

"Library?" he asks. "Go on. Lav said she'd be up soon."

She doesn't need to go to the library. She needs to talk to Professor Snape. "I love you, Ron," Hermione says, gathering school bag, hat, scarf, and cloak. She freezes half-way through collecting her things as she realizes she didn't say that once to her parents over the holidays.

"You okay?" Ron asks, jolting her back into motion.

"Yeah," she says. "Just--remembered something I forgot."

\--

She comes clattering to a stop just inside Professor Snape's office. Draco's already there, actually sitting on the edge of Professor Snape's desk, tie loose, shirt untucked, and one expensive-looking slipper hanging off his toes. The other is already on the floor. Hermione wouldn't dream of sitting on Professor Snape's desk. She hitches her schoolbag more securely onto her shoulder.

"Licorice?" Draco asks, holding out a gilt box with licorice sticks inside.

Hermione takes one automatically; she doesn't like licorice. "Where's Professor Snape?"

"You're welcome, Granger," he says, biting off the end of his own licorice stick and covering the box again. "Rowena Burroughs had an accident."

"Is she homesick again?" She shoves her free hand into her pocket, then changes her mind and takes it out again.

"How would you know that?" Draco slides off the desk and wiggles his slipper back on.

"I don't ignore people who aren't in my house," Hermione says.

"No, a Gryffindor is always good and kind," Draco says. His eyes are bright and guileless; he looks like he believes his own words, but Hermione knows him better than that. "Hols sucked. You want the chair?"

"Didn't get what you wanted?" she asks.

"Nope," he says with a little curl of a smile. He nods at her with the point of his chin. "What happened to your bag?"

"Charm."

Draco's mouth settles firmly into a smirk. "Which Expanding Charm was it? They don't work too well on synthetics."

Hermione can't tell if he's being snooty or just trying too hard to be friendly. She settles for returning the smirk with a brittle smile of her own.

"Seriously, Granger, sit down." He hops up onto the desk again, letting both slippers fall, and crosses his legs. His socks have little clocks on the ankles, charmed ones with miniature minute-hands going round and round, the kind of socks that cost more than Hermione's entire outfit. "Come on," Draco says, looking rather more mischievous than belligerent. It's an expression Ron might wear, which is probably even less of a reason to sit.

"But--" Professor Snape won't like it.

"The professor's my godfather; say I told you to."

Hermione rolls her eyes. Draco thinks he can get away with anything, but that doesn't mean he's right.

"Please?" he says, "I know you're not scare of _him_ , and it's not like I've forgotten how hard you hit."

Professor Snape's straight-backed wooden chair is the perfect height for the desk. It has more than the standard cushioning charm on it, and she sinks into it. It wraps around her like a blanket. She blinks at Draco, who's swiveled to face her, sitting cross-legged with his ankles crumpling the edge of the blotter. "Good?"

It's the best she's felt since the Dreamless Sleep. "Are you still a prefect?" she asks. It's too much effort right now to try to remember. Hermione's year has had trouble keeping their badges, Hermione included. Only Ravenclaw still has both of its original prefects.

"The only reason I'd give that a six out of ten is because the insult's implied," Draco says, tracing lazy circles on the blotter with his finger. There's a bit of colour rising in his cheeks as he stares at his fingers instead of holding her gaze.

"I was going to say you'd make a good one."

"Now you're just buttering me up." When he looks at her, the color's gone and his expression is blank. "Want to tell Uncle Draco what's wrong?"

Hermione rolls her eyes again. "No, but I dislike you marginally less than I did a quarter-hour ago."

"Did you do our herbology homework?" he asks abruptly.

"What do you think?" she replies.

"Aren't you Miss Know-It-All. You pick a conversation topic, then." He throws one of Professor Snape's quills at her, nib end first. It flutters into her lap. She places it back in the pen-holder.

"How's Professor Snape your godfather?" she asks. "I thought you Malfoys were all about blood status."

Draco crosses his arms. "You're worse than my father."

"I doubt that," Professor Snape says from the doorway. "Happy winter term, Miss Granger."

"How's Rowena?" Hermione asks.

"Settled," Professor Snape says. "For the present." He says nothing about their respective positions on his desk and in his chair. He leans on the doorframe and studies them for a few minutes, then he summons a stool from the classroom and sets it where he can use the bookshelves as a backrest.

"Why can Granger sit in your chair?" Draco demands.

"I'll get up," Hermione offers weakly.

"It's still Christmas until tonight," Professor Snape says. He draws one knee up, hooking a heel over the crossbar on the stool, opens a very obviously new book against his thigh, and proceeds to ignore them, even when Draco snaps one of his quills.

"Miss Granger." She blinks awake. She's still settled against the straight back of Professor Snape's chair. Draco's licorice is sticky in her hand, but Draco himself is gone. Professor Snape crouches by her side, frowning slightly. "Fifteen minutes 'til dinner."

"Can I talk to you after?" she asks, tongue thick with sleep. "I thought of something."

"Of course you did," he says, the tone of his voice falling just beyond sardonic into a territory Hermione has no name for.

\---

Professor Dumbledore's welcome speech sets the term off with the reminder that Gryffindor is only fifty points ahead of Ravenclaw.

"Only!" Ron exclaims. "Fifty's not nothing!" Two of the fourth years sitting closest to them bang on the table in agreement. Hermione's silverware trembles.

Professor Dumbledore pauses to let the cheering from the Gryffindor table swell, then fade naturally as he smiles benevolently over them. "Now," he says, "I know many of your parents are concerned about problems in the world today. At home over the holidays, you've seen how preoccupied they are with what is printed in the papers. There is violence, and politics, and prejudice. But let us all be brave, and dedicated to our schoolwork, and there will be no need to worry. I know that we will have a fine term this winter. I wish all of you good marks."

"No need to worry?" says Hermione to Ron. "Does he remember the sort of thing that inevitably happens to us at school, every single year?"

Ron shrugs. "Maybe it's already happened this year. I mean, Neville..." He swallows. "And Harry."

"No," Hermione says. "We have no idea what is coming."

"Weren't you making a survival kit?" Ron asks as the first dish is served. He stretches and snags a serving platter before the pair of fourth years can get to it.

Hermione pulls her beaded purse from her schoolbag at her feet. "This is it. Did you really think I drag my books everywhere for fun?"

"You don't?" Ron asks. Lavender laughs. Ron amends, "Well, not for fun, precisely, but you read a lot."

"That?" Lavender sounds impressed. "It not even bulging. Is it spelled?"

"That's right," Hermione says. "Ron, I need a jumper of yours. Something warm."

"How about mum's Christmas jumper from last year? That's warm."

"Something that fits," Hermione specifies. "Get me one of Harry's, too."

"Hey," Ron says, "ruddlethumps. Over here, Gin. I didn't get any of those yet."

"Do you need one of mine?" Lavender says. "Because I don't really have a jumper I can not wear while you carry it around. Ron, stop; I'm not going to eat that much starch."

\---

"I think Harry might have--" Hermione can't say it.

Professor Snape dries his hands on the towel by the sink in the classroom. "Fetch a number four-and-a-half cauldron while you're thinking, please."

Hermione has to grab a stool to get the cauldron down, nearly overbalancing herself because it's a gigantic cast-iron monstrosity with a reinforced bottom. Professor Snape is preparing a workstation for brewing. She swings the cauldron up onto its hook, careful to center it properly. She dusts her hands off and sighs. "Neville was supposed to sit with us for the Sorting," she says. "We agreed on the train--you're making Pepper-Up. Can I help?"

"If you wish." He leaves the ingredients and the cauldron for Pepper-Up to her and starts setting up a second work-station, not for Pepper-Up, since the first jar he sets out is dried fluxweed.

"But he didn't," she continues, "and we didn't really think about it because Lavender was there, and it was the first day back, and then there were the first years. Who uses this much Pepper-Up?"

"Your classmates," Professor Snape says sharply. "So I expect a perfect potion, if you please."

Pepper-Up is easy. It's one of the potions they do in class because the quantities are forgiving and the timing isn't sensitive. Half of the ingredients get mixed separately, dry, and then dumped in together at once. The worst is the splattering, and only Neville managed to ruin his potion by stirring clockwise for a full minute, instead of once, and counter-clockwise. There's so much of it in the cauldron now that takes two hands and more effort than she expects to stir. Hermione covers the cauldron and checks the flame. It will have to simmer, but it's done.

"The last time I saw Neville was when he dropped Trevor II getting out of the carriages."

"Trevor II?" Professor Snape squints at a dark liquid he's adding to a beaker, drop by drop.

"His toad. The thing is," she says, "Ron and I can't remember where Harry was between then and the Sorting."

"Hold this," he orders. "It's horklump juice and salamander blood; don't shake it."

"You know where he was," Hermione says. The beaker is warm. "Don't you?"

"Pour steadily on three--one, two, three. A bit faster next time." He pushes a cutting board at her. "One cup of Wiggentree bark, sliced as thinly as you can manage, against the grain. Use a silver knife."

Hermione doesn't know what he's making, but it involves wand work again, intricate and beautiful, and someday she's going to learn how to do that. She watches while he focuses on the purplish bubbles rising through it that smell like lemon when they burst. His wand balances delicately on his fingers, flicking in sharp staccato over the bubbles. "Chop, Miss Granger."

"This is like detention," she gripes, sorting through the silver knives for one with a sharp enough and thin enough blade to cut the bark without crumbling it.

"I'd give you one," Professor Snape says shortly, "if I thought it would make any difference whatsoever."

When they've finished the next series of steps, he puts a stasis charm on the cauldron. It will never not be strange to Hermione to see a flame freeze. He bottles the Pepper-Up and scrubs the cauldron efficiently; she blots what she can and turns it over the draining rack to finish drying overnight.

"You'll wear a smock next time," Professor Snape says, as if seeing her for the first time this evening. "You've got Pepper-Up splatter on your robes." He rubs at the corner of his eye. When she doesn't move to go he asks, "Was there something else?"

"No," Hermione says. "What's the second potion?"

"Wolfsbane," he says.

Harry's still in the hospital wing, but no one stops Hermione from sliding under the covers with him and wrapping an arm around his shoulders. He doesn't smell like himself; he has that sterile smell of hospital sheets and antiseptics.

\---

Madam Pince keeps back copies of the _Daily Prophet_ and _The Quibbler_. Hermione scans the December headlines hurriedly. Mentions of Death Eater attacks on muggles or muggleborn witches and wizards appear somewhere on the front page of both papers for most of the month. There's a letter to the editor in _The Quibbler_ mid-month asking whether Death Eaters should also be blamed for all of the accidental tragedies that can befall a muggle community, citing car accidents and "mono-carboxy poisoning". Hermione can't figure out whether the Ministry of Magic wants to pretend nothing is happening, or shake down the entire wizarding population to uncover the identity of the Death Eaters. "Recent accounts greatly exaggerated," reads the _Daily Prophet_ ; _The Quibbler_ questions, "Defamation Scandal: are radicals terrorists slandering the name of a conventional secret society?"

But around the same dates, the _Prophet_ also proclaims, "Constant Vigilance and Unvarying Compliance needed." "Why we should legalize and require veritaserum for all arrests," it argues. _The Quibbler_ publishes, "In depth: what the proposed new policies might mean for you" and "10 arguments in favour of a nation-wide register of known Death Eaters."

The "right wing radicals" go on strike around Christmas to protest the lack of reaction by the Minister. On the twenty-ninth, the Minister proposes a set of conciliatory measures and half his staff quits in dissent.

"Hey, Granger," Draco says, straddling the chair behind her and leaning on the back. She has to put down _The Quibbler_ 's New Year's Eve edition and turn around to see him properly. "It's my godfather's birthday tomorrow and usually the Slytherin seventh years chip in together to get him something. We already did, but I thought maybe you...?"

"Maybe I?" Hermione asks when it seems he's not going to finish the sentence, because she's not sure whether Draco Malfoy's actually asking her for money.

He clenches one hand into a fist. "Anyone but you and it'd just be, 'want to come eat stale Boxing Day biscuits with a bunch of people you hate?' and 'sure, Malfoy, that sounds sweet.'"

"Anyone else would have just said, 'hey, want to come to a party?'"

"Nevermind," Draco says, backing off the chair.

"I'll come if you really want," says Hermione.

"I wish you wouldn't," he says. "Don't bring your little posse."

The conversation must make more sense to someone else in the library at the time, because by dinner, Professor Snape is looking down his nose at her from the high table with a curious expression and Ron elbows her in the ribs before she can sit down. "Are you--do you _like_ Malfoy?"

"Ron," she says.

"Seriously."

"He's a slug," Hermione grouses.

"Okay," Ron says, and apparently forgets about it.

Professor Snape's birthday party that evening is--strange. They do eat stale Boxing Day biscuits and end up chasing a pair of chocolate frogs that escape in the potions classroom. They play children's games--Snakes and Whistles, and Sulking Squid, and Gobstones--which is not at all what Hermione expects from the Slytherins. Pansy's even nicer to her than Sally-Anne has ever been, and the Syltherins give Professor Snape a crystal ball that only offers insults. The first thing it tells him is that nobody likes him, which to Hermione's surprise makes him laugh. Professor Snape hugs his Slytherins, or shakes their hands; Hermione can't quite tell what the rule is as to who gets which. Theodore Nott, grinning, hugs him back. Hermione hangs back, not feeling entitled to any sort of recognition, but Professor Snape meets her eyes over Millicent's head. For a moment she's dizzy, spinning into an unfamiliar world. "Dunderheads," the crystal ball says in Professor Snape's soft, threatening voice, and Hermione blinks in surprise. It's not just spelled, it's _customised_.

Hermione doesn't even know when Professor McGonagall's birthday is.

\---

"I'm coming with you. There's a book I need," Hermione says when the Professor Dumbledore summons Harry. "It's supposed to be kept in the Headmaster's office. Can you try to find out if it's still there?"

"I could just ask him for it," Harry suggests.

"It's Dark." Which is why Hermione has no intention of apologizing or explaining herself. It's better not to get caught.

Harry grins, eager enough that she can hear it in his voice. "So we're just going to borrow it behind his back?"

"We won't necessarily have to take it," Hermione says. "If it were mine, I'd jinx it so no one could take it. I just need to look something up."

"I'll try. What's it look like?"

"I don't know. It's called _Secrets of the Darkest Art_." Professor Snape's books mention it. Hermione's beginning to think it's the only book with details about horcruxes instead of vague references and oblique warnings. When she went to look it up, the card in the library's catalogue had a fading inscription written diagonally across it: "Removed to the Headmaster's office for safe-keeping." It's been gone for long enough that the gap where it might have been is nowhere to be found, absorbed as new volumes and new editions changed the shelving over the years.

Hermione waits for Harry at the foot of the stairs to the Headmaster's study.

When he doesn't return after ten minutes, she sits on the bottom step and tries to lose herself in the library copy of _Arithmancy Around You_ , but she can't focus. The gargoyle blows raspberries at her until she threatens to take a chisel to its front teeth.

She makes herself take careful notes, and is halfway through the book before Harry emerges.

"What did he want?" she asks.

Harry beams at her. "Nothing. He said some stuff about St Mungo's not having any better facilities than Hogwarts, and how he's really proud of me for keeping up in class despite the headaches. I'm a credit to Gryffindor."

"You're studying from my notes instead of going to class," Hermione says.

"You're a credit to Gryffindor," Harry states solemnly. "And he said if I'm still interested in becoming an auror he'll help get me an internship in the Ministry--"

"Honestly, the Ministry, Harry? Minister Scrimgeour is completely out of favour. Haven't you been reading the papers?"

"No," says Harry, "but it's still the Ministry."

Hermione can't deny that.

"There's a lot of important work going on," Harry blunders on excitedly, taking smaller steps so that she can keep up with his long strides. "I could be part of that. I want to be part of the fight against the Dark, before I--before the-- I mean, I'm not just a kid in a Defense classroom, yeah? There's Dark everywhere, and the Slytherins--"

"Is that what Dumbledore said?" Hermione asks.

"Dumbledore knows what's going on, better than the rest of them. I think they might have asked him to be Minister for Magic next." Harry shrugs. "Or maybe I'll just do an independent study with a real auror."

Something's _wrong_ with everything coming out of Harry's mouth, but Hermione can't come up with one logical reason for the sense of wrongness climbing up her spine. She says instead, "But if you're at the Ministry, when are you going to get your homework done?"

"Yeah, I know. I told him I'd think about it. But, Hermione, it's a really good idea, and Ron's always with Lav and you're off in the library."

"Oh--the library. Did you see the book?"

"No." Harry shakes his head. "But I couldn't get a look at the shelves behind his desk without being too obvious about it. We'll have to go back later."

"All right," Hermione concedes. She'd agree to anything. It's the most like himself that he's been since mid-summer.

\---

Hermione wants to sleep. She's gone from her last class today--Defence Against the Dark Arts--to a Ravenclaw-Gryffindor Apparition training workshop with Madam Hooch to the tutoring session with the fifth-year Muggle Studies class to the library to do her own homework. From the library she went to dinner, then spent half an hour trying to track down Ron, who is becoming increasingly hard to find when he lets Lavender decide where they're hiding for the evening. She spends almost twenty minutes in the potions classroom re-reading parts of the grimoire, then loses track of time in the library again. She has to sprint if she wants to make it to the hospital wing before Madam Pomfrey closes the doors for the night.

"The Fat Lady is looking for you, Miss Granger," Professor Dumbledore says, cornering her when she's close enough to hospital wing for it to be evident she's not going somewhere else.

"I've only come to say goodnight to Harry," Hermione explains.

Professor Dumbledore checks his pocketwatch. "I don't believe you have nearly enough time for a visit." He turns it to her, and, yes, the hand with her name on it is already moving from "going to be late" to "out after curfew". Harry's is steady at "feeling miserable".

"Sorry," Hermione says. Hermione's mum, when Hermione had first learned the word and discovered it excused a multitude of transgressions, had tried to impress upon her that actions speak louder than words. Hermione had taken that to mean the importance of not getting caught in the first place. It's moot when dealing with Professor Dumbledore; they can usually get away with minor infractions in front of him if they apologize.

"Regardless, Miss Granger," he says, to her surprise. "You've had a long day. It's time you were in bed."

Harry would have ignored him, and Ron would have gone but snuck back. Alone, though, Hermione can't bring herself to open defiance; she's reduced to a "yes, Headmaster," and an about-face.

Predictably, she can't sleep. Fay and Parvati hang off the edges of their beds whispering for ages, and when they finally stop, Hermione is bored.

"Would you lie still?" Lavender hisses at her as Hermione readjusts her blankets. "At least until I get back to sleep, since you woke me again?"

"Fine," Hermione says, and holds herself motionless for as long as she can bear it. Her ribs itch; her pajama bottoms are tangled constrictingly around her left knee. She can feel her wand like a pulse under her pillow, inches from her right hand.

When she finally drifts off, she dreams Voldemort is making horcruxes left and right, splintering his soul and driving himself slowly into madness. He can't be stopped, and finally the wizarding world is reduced to half-bloods, as pureblood and muggleborn witches and wizards hunt each other out of existence. She wakes herself with the metallic taste of blood from her bitten lip. Hermione struggles between wanting to go back to sleep and wanting to get up; she's wasting time sleeping, when she still doesn't know what killed Neville or how to stop it. Her Universal Base potion is far from finished, and the more she learns about horcruxes the less she knows about how to help Harry.

Hermione wants another dose of Dreamless Sleep so much it's like needles under her skin.

\---

"Not this evening, Miss Granger," Professor Snape says when she turns up to work on the Universal Base. The classroom is shut and locked; she's knocked on his office door. He hasn't even opened it, just thrown his voice with a spell.

"Why not?" she calls, and the door opens suddenly.

"Because I'm not at your disposal tonight," he says, his back to her. He's wearing dark robes cut differently that what she usually sees him in, a cloak bunched and tossed over one shoulder as he straightens his office distractedly, moving a little too fast.

Hermione stands to the side, out of the way of the path between desk and bookshelves. "Can I do anything?"

"Go back up to Gryffindor Tower," he says.

She stops with one foot still in the office. "Something's wrong. Are you all right?"

"Your developing nose for this sort of thing is a nuisance," he says, but there's no bite to it. "Go on; sit up tonight with Minerva if you'd like." He pushes her out the door ahead of him, pulling it closed after them both. "Colloportus."

Professor McGonagall is already in her rooms. She answers the door wearing tartan slippers that match her wrap. "Hermione."

"Professor Snape was just--pleasant," Hermione says.

Professor McGonagall throws her head back and laughs. "Bless you; I needed that."

"He left the castle," Hermione realizes. "You're waiting up until he comes back."

"I am, at that; you don't think Albus would? Was he dressed when he left?"

"Of course," Hermione says, before she realizes where she's seen the shape and cut of his robes before. "No--no, he wasn't, not fully." The _Daily Prophet_ has carried dozens of pictures of Death Eaters. Hermione sends her gaze skittering across Professor McGonagall's sitting room, over a teaching journal spread face-down near the hearth, the steaming oversized teacup, the grade-book half-hidden under a pillow.

Professor McGonagall purses her lips. "Re-joining the Death Eaters isn't something one plays at, Hermione."

"He said I could stay up with you."

"Professor Snape is too generous for his own good," Professor McGonagall says. "I'd have marched you right back to your own common room."

"I'll go," Hermione agrees, but she hesitates. "Are you sure he's all right?"

"As rain. I said I _would_ have sent you off. I won't contradict a fellow teacher, even if, as your Head of House, I disagree. You know me better than that, Hermione."

Professor McGonagall lures her onto the couch with the offer of her own seventh-year Transfiguration textbook. Her sitting room is warm and the textbook smells old. The font is uneven, as though the letters were set by hand, full of fancy ligatures and ornate ampersands. There are no photos, only hand-drawn and -labeled diagrams, some of which fade magically from one illustrated stage of transformation to another, the wizarding version of animation.

It's past curfew and Professor McGonagall is nodding in an armchair by the fire when Hermione finally drifts off. The rise and fall of murmured conversation wakes her shortly afterwards: Professors McGonagall and Snape's voices pitched low and unhurried. The noise stops when she shifts, unwilling to open her eyes, but picks up again shortly after, a little less guarded.

"If she were one of mine, I'd be tempted to lay a Cradle Charm on her bed," Professor Snape says idly.

"What are you doing with the girl, Severus?"

"I don't know," he says. Hermione can hear him shift. A floorboard creaks as he moves. "Irma didn't want her, Poppy was adamant, and she wasn't talking to you. Albus approves."

"That alone's enough for worry," says Professor McGonagall. "He's a perverse bastard."

"I _have_ met the man," Professor Snape says. There's a short pause before he continues. "Dear Circe, do I wish I drank. I've had quite enough of bigotry, brutality, and vandalism for one evening--and I still have rounds."

"Do the short route by the Astronomy Tower; let the children have their fun if they're sneaking about tonight."

He sighs. "Whenever I've done that, someone gets hurt. Speaking of which, Minnie: someone needs to take Hagrid in hand again."

Hermione forgets she's supposed to be asleep. "Why?"

They're both backlit by the fire, Professor McGonagall in her armchair, her ankles crossed on the poof, and Professor Snape on his feet, as though he's been pacing. "Ought I apologize, or have you just woken on that last?" Professor Snape asks.

Professor McGonagall sputters. "I don't care what Albus approves. If you're just going to banter, take Hermione down to the Fat Lady and do your rounds. It's already half eleven; I'd like to get some sleep."

"But it's still early," Hermione says in surprise.

\---

Ron goes with her because Harry's sick, again. They throw a blanket over the gargoyle when they go back for a better look around the Headmaster's office. There isn't supposed to be anyone there--Professor Dumbledore is meeting with the Heads of House, but when they press up behind the unlatched door Hermione discovers that the meeting is here, in the office.

"--students reviled for something they haven't yet done," Professor Snape says in a voice like a whip.

"I don't believe you're one to cast stones, my boy," Professor Dumbledore replies. "I welcomed you here all those years ago because I believed your remorse was sincere, but the Board of Governors has always been sceptical of your place among schoolchildren."

"My place?" Professor Snape roars, angrier that Hermione has ever heard him. "I wanted nothing to do with the snot-nosed brats from the very beginning. Forgive me, Albus, if I do the job you foisted upon me more attentively than you hoped."

"I know you're disappointed, but I can hardly allow a few rotten eggs to be a danger to the other students."

"Give me the cloak," Hermione says to Ron. "I'm going inside. If they're arguing, they're not going to be looking for me."

"You're not serious," Ron says. "You're going willingly into an enclosed space where Snape sounds like that?"

"Hurry up."

"--drag them back by their ears if I must," Professor Snape is saying. "--can throw me out with them. Will you falsify grounds for that, too, Headmaster?"

"Nothing will be decided without proof," Professor Sprout says, "particularly where the children are concerned."

"Thank you, Pomona, dear," says Professor Dumbledore. "May I take this moment to congratulate you? My friends, Heads of this school: your new Deputy Headmistress."

A single person claps. Ron does up the clasp under her chin and adjusts the hood.

"Careful," he says. "I think Sirius must have had it hemmed at some point. If you stand up on your toes, your feet'll show."

No one's actually facing the door as she edges it cautiously open and slips sideways through the gap. Professor Snape is still on his feet, scowling thunderously at Professor Dumbledore, and the other professors--Flitwick, Spout, and McGonagall--are looking at them. Hermione eases the door shut behind her and hopes she'll be able to get out again.

"Forty galleons," Professor Snape sneers, "that Gryffindor will win the House Cup. Again. If that's all?"

"Please, Severus," Professor McGonagall says. "No one's going to take you up on that one. And may the best house win."

"It always does," Professor Dumbledore says cheerfully as Hermione squeezes between Professor Flitwick's chair and a smoking glass orb on a stand that doesn't look like it will survive being bumped into. "Now where were we?"

 _Secrets of the Darkest Art_ is chained to a low shelf hidden by Professor Dumbledore's desk. It shivers minutely closer to her when she reaches toward it, as though anticipating her touch, desiring it. Hermione snatches her hand back. She steels herself and reaches out again. The book swells. It sings silently under her fingers, flooding her with a rush of yearning that twists in her chest and a whispered promise of power.

"--don't approve of--" Professor Snape breaks off. Hermione freezes, but the book pulls at her. It wants more than her fingertips, then more than her palm. She wrenches her hands away. This is nothing like Professor Snape's books on Dark magic. She's going to have to come back; if she touches it again right now, she'll either end up clutching it to her or stuck in a crouch in front of the low shelf until she's read it cover to cover. Professor Snape clears his throat. "I _shall never_ approve of allowing the Ministry leeway with anyone underage, regardless of who shall be present."

"Heard," Professor Flitwick says, "and duly noted in the official record, but overruled, four to one; if there are indeed Death Eaters among our students, I can't in good conscience stand aside."

Hermione shifts sideways and leans back against the cupboard next to the shelves, careful to hold the invisibility cloak close around herself, tucked over her shoes. She makes herself breathe through her nose until she feels steadier.

\---

Professor Snape is in a foul mood that afternoon. He helps her dice the lovage, though, complaining about her sloppiness, the workstation tabletop between them as she sets out the ingredients for the next part of the Universal Base. When she reaches for the shrivelfig, he drops the knife and clamps her wrist to the table. "Haven't you bothered to look up why it's called a shrivelfig?" he asks.

"No," Hermione says honestly. "There's always been something more pressing."

"Be careful what you touch," he says, curt and sharp. He releases her hand and goes back to rocking his knife through the lovage stalks. "I'll peel them in a moment. Shred the goosegrass; I doubt you can ruin that."

Hermione blinks at the prickle of tears. He'll eviscerate her if she cries; she ducks her head and starts shredding.

"Are you trying to force me to retract my previous statement? A little less viciously, if you please." Professor Snape finishes dicing and scrapes the lovage into a pile with the blade of the knife. He reaches across her field of vision for the first of the three shrivelfigs and peels it efficiently, breaking the skin with his thumbs and turning the rind back until the fruit pops out, whole and untouched, onto the dish. He peels all three in less time than it would have taken Hermione to do one, leaving them each on perfectly-aligned dishes of their own. It'll be more washing up, but this way she won't have to touch them to add them one by one.

"Can you manage?" he asks tetchily, "Or do you need to be baby-sat through the brewing as well?"

"No," Hermione says.

"No, you can't manage, or no, you'll allow me to get something else done today?"

"If I'm such an imposition, why do you bother?" Hermione says.

"Isn't that the question," he sneers. "Don't touch the shrivelfigs when you add them. My door is open, if you find you've bitten off more than you can chew."

He does leave the door adjoining the office and the classroom open, but Hermione doubts anything short of a melting cauldron would make her desperate enough to accept that invitation. She breaks the stasis spell on her earlier work and flips the time-piece to keep track of how long it boils. Five more minutes, then she'll add the shredded goosegrass.

This is the second-to-last of the brewer's bases that make up the Universal Base potion. She's getting much better at the simple steps, enough that the difference is noticeable in class, especially when Professor Snape sets potions that can be brewed within the hour only if they don't dawdle. She hasn't felt rushed or panicked in class in ages. She did the Duplicating Potion last week methodically--almost mindlessly--and finished almost fifteen minutes early. Professor Snape took points off for "poor use of the remaining class time"; he never gives perfect marks for anything.

She glances over at his office and finds him watching her brew, expressionless.

"I'm managing," she announces, and tips the first shrivelfig in.

"My most devout felicitations," he says, flashing her a brief smile of yellowed, crooked teeth that is maybe as sincere as his voice is.

The cauldron doesn't melt, and he stops watching her like a hawk once the shrivelfigs have all been added. It takes just over twenty minutes of stirring for them to dissolve completely. Hermione adds the lovage, finishes the next step, and calls Professor Snape over to inspects the potion. A stasis charm cast at an inappropriate moment won't hold properly. Hermione knows just enough not to trust her own instinct on when to place a one.

"Ten points from Gryffindor," Professor Snape says, scowling at her as she finishes cleaning up.

"You can't take points for no reason," she observes.

"I'm sure if you reflect on your activities before this little brewing session, you'll discover I've been rather lenient."

\---

Daphne Greengrass steers Hermione into the girls' toilets nearest to the door to the Care of Magical Creatures yard, where the first stall leaks. No one uses it because there's always a pool of water just inside the door.

"Hold out your hand, Granger," Daphne says, businesslike. When Hermione complies, she drops a bar of soap onto her palm. "Wash. Or you'll smell like graphorn all day."

"Thanks," Hermione says. "But I brought my own soap. Did you read the notes on that chapter? Scamander wrote that graphorn sneezes carry over four hundred thousand known types of bacteria; I didn't want to take the chance."

"Use your own then," Daphne says. "No one likes falling sick."

Daphne leans on the rusty rim of the next sink. Hermione hasn't had anyone supervise her hand-washing since she stopped needing a stool to be able to reach the tap. She pushes up her sleeves and gets to work. Daphne's soap lathers beautifully. It smells of coconut and spice. Hermione can feel the drying mucous peeling away from her skin under the suds. She dries her hands on her robes.

"You didn't have to come with me," she tells Daphne. "You're missing the rest of class."

"Hagrid's a joke, anyway." Daphne scrubs her own hands, magics the bar of soap dry, and drops it back into her bag. When Hermione moves towards the door, Daphne steps in front of her.

Daphne reaches out and trails a finger down Hermione's bared arm. "You're clean. How? I could smell it on you the other day."

"Oh, honestly," Hermione says. "I'm not doing Dark magic."

Daphne crosses her arms. "You can't do Dark magic in secret. It... cloys. Clings."

"Let me see your arm," Hermione says. Her voice sounds thin and cold, even to her.

Daphne freezes, then bunches her sleeve up to her elbow. "Happy?" she asks. "My mum used to make us kiss hers before we went to bed. I've always been able to tell."

The black-inked snake lifts its head, twisting over Daphne's skin to flick its tongue at Hermione.

"You've seen Professor Snape's, haven't you," Daphne says, looking curiously at the mark on her own arm. "Did you touch it?"

"It recognizes me?" Hermione squeaks.

"You don't know _anything_ ," Daphne says. "It's a year old. Birthday present from my parents. They're proud. What did yours get you last year?"

"A photo album," says Hermione after a moment. "A muggle one, from a muggle shop, with muggle photographs that don't move."

Daphne nods. "I don't care about blood status, but if you tell anyone--you will."

"I'm not afraid of you," Hermione lies through her teeth. "Cover up."

Daphne pulls her sleeve back down and shakes her wrist. She draws a tarnished silver medallion on a long chain out from under her collar and pulls it off over her head. She has to stop to untangle it from her hair. "This was mine, before. You can have it."

It's a lumpy representation of a snake in the grass. "What's it do?"

"Nothing," Daphne sighs. "It's safe."

\---

Professor McGonagall assembles them all in the morning, before breakfast. They're all varying degrees of awake, gathering in front of the stairs to the dormitories, which means the crowd of Gryffindors is mostly segregated between boys and girls.

"Children," says Professor McGonagall, using a sonorous charm to cut easily across the murmur without seeming to raise her voice. "This is Kingsley Shacklebolt, your new Head of House. Mr Shacklebolt--"

"Kingsley is fine," the man says.

"-- _Mister_ Shacklebolt is a talented and capable wizard, a staunch Gryffindor, and will do you proud. Give him a warm welcome."

"Percy says he's a real asset and a first-class auror," Ginny says. "He's a member of the Order of the Phoenix's Advance Guard."

"I believe that," says Parvati, fervently. "He's kind of hot, don't you think?"

It's so absurd that Hermione pinches herself, once in the hallway and twice in the Great Hall. It hurts, but the feeling that she's dreaming won't go away. Then the post is delivered and Lavender shrieks. The seventh year Gryffindors crowd her to see what the problem is. Lavender has unfolded today's _Daily Prophet_ on her plate. "Who is Teaching Our Children?" the headline asks. "Minerva McGonagall exposed as a supporter of You-Know-Who; 'Tom and I are more than friends.'" There's even a picture of Professor McGonagall, nearly fifty years younger, watching fireworks explode, her arm linked through that of a dark-haired wizard who is identified by the paper as Tom Riddle.

\---

Lavender is white. "I told her about my parents wanting to start a muggle-born rights group. She hugged me in fifth year. Can we still drop Transfiguration?" She looks around, wide-eyed and unseeing, until Ron wraps his arms around her while she trembles.

"Help," he mouths at Harry and Hermione.

"But it's okay that Snape's a you-know-what?" Harry asks Hermione. "Did you know? Didn't you used to talk to her all the time?"

"Of course I didn't know," Hermione scolds. 

Lavender is still pale next time Hermione sees her, in Transfiguration class later that morning. The classroom is silent throughout the entire class hour. Seamus stammers when Professor McGonagall calls on him. First years with Professor Snape are less differential, Hermione thinks. She bites her tongue to keep from frowning and puts her hand up.

"--against the--yes, Miss Granger?"

"Isn't that the same theory as switching ravens and writing desks like we did last year?" she asks.

Professor McGonagall smiles faintly at her. Next to Hermione, Fay flinches.

"It is, isn't it?" Hermione continues. "Why do we have to do it again?"

Across the narrow aisle between their desks, Hermione can hear Ron draw in his breath as though bracing himself. It's absurd. Professor McGonagall likes questions and student participation. All of her students know that. She says it herself, and then rewards it throughout the year.

Hermione turns around to look at her classmates while Professor McGonagall answers her question patiently. Hermione will never become a teacher; she would have no patience for this sea of blank and frightened faces.

Professor McGonagall turns her away afterwards. "You don't need to be coddled, Hermione. If this isn't about Transfiguration, take it to the proper person."

"But I wanted to talk to you," Hermione says, surprised.

Professor McGonagall adjusts her spectacles. "You're going to have to learn to get along without me."

"So you're Hermione Granger," Kingsley says, rising from his seat in the front corner of the classroom and holding out a hand for her to shake. "Brightest witch in generations. Your questions in class were right on--pleased to know you're as brave as they come, too."

\---

It's a clear night. Tonight's not a new moon; the moon was waning gibbous earlier in the week, but it isn't up yet. Hermione finds the Hunter by habit, the first constellation her father taught her to recognize. Lepus, at his feet, Monoceros and Taurus and a curl of Eridanus by his sides. Gemini draws her head back; there's Auriga, Lynx, and Cancer. The whole sky brightens and blurs with her tears. Her breath comes in bursts of fog, warming damply through her knit mittens.

Not much earlier in the evening, Ginny was going on so casually about laundry charms that Hermione finally cracked the offensively misogynist _A New Mother's Little Book of Housemaking_ , a small paperback that hasn't been updated in a century. Mrs Weasley bought a new printing for her two years ago, with a photo of a grinning young witch with a happy baby and an apron on the cover. There's an unsigned dedication from Mrs Weasley on the title page: "Janus Kiprotich would have made a rather more competent housewizard than writer." It's a lexicon of household charms and spells that most wizarding children--or at least the Weasleys--grow up learning the way Hermione learned to dry the dinner dishes and do the hoovering. She could scarcely read in the Gryffindor common room, where Kingsley joins them after dinner; the first charm Hermione laid eyes on is for "darning your husband's socks to keep his friends from noticing your frugal home and to spare him the knuts for a pint", and when she hastily turned a few pages, the next was the Cradle Charm.

Hermione wipes her tears with the tips of her mittens. She's not afraid that someone will come up and find her, not even the professor patrolling the corridors. It's too cold on top of the Astronomy tower for snogging or snuggling, even with a warming charm. The dog star pulls Canis Major up from the horizon. Sirius went through the veil for Harry. Mrs Weasley knits anti-accident charms into her family's Christmas jumpers. Hermione hears now and then that Professor Snape has sat up all night with Rowena Borroughs; she's seen lower form Hufflepuffs trail Professor Sprout about the castle on weekends. Professor McGonagall was always stern, and Kingsley--Hermione wants nothing to do with him.

The chill burns down her throat when she takes a deep breath. To keep the others from seeing her cry, she had to pretend she'd botched her summoning charm and let her winter things hide her face for a moment. It was the Cradle Charm that did it. Kiprotich is careful to add the warning, "DO NOT USE for your neighbours' or your friends' offspring, though magically talented mothers may include children temporarily in their care, and a witch with a particularly strong mothering instinct can occasionally cast a successful cradle charm for her younger siblings." No one can cast a Cradle Charm for Hermione.

The sky is huge. Below her, there are Death Eaters in the castle, doing ordinary things like helping housemates with their homework or picking out socks for tomorrow. Hermione should start wearing Daphne Greengrass's medallion that does nothing, if it's all she has. The cold seeps up through the wool of her cloak, through the knees of her jeans.

\---

Ron is off with Lavender. They are "divinating".

"Divining," Hermione corrected, but Harry insists that divinating is more appropriate. It's not like Ron meant they were actually divining, scientifically speaking.

That leaves Harry and Hermione sitting on one of the benches in the apparition practice yard behind the herbology greenhouses; Hermione has been braiding her shoelaces. Harry is literally doing nothing. It's proof that neither of them knows how to have fun and Harry makes her pinky-swear never to mention it to anyone before he folds his hands over his knees again stares off into the middle distance. Since she's promised Ron they won't study for at least an hour, Hermione's reduced to looking at her wristwatch every few minutes and outlining her transfiguration essay in her head. It's a good enough distraction from the series of residential gas explosions in northern London that have been in the papers, even the wizarding ones. She glances at Harry.

"Your nose, Harry!" Hermione says. There's a trickle of dark blood halfway to his upper lip. He wipes it absently, smearing it. It's still wet, but no longer bleeding.

The sight of blood on his hand makes Harry's chin tremble. He squeezes his eyes shut, but tears leak out anyway. They're ridiculous, fat tears. He barely makes a sound while Hermione presses a handful of snow into her handkerchief and cleans the smear of blood off his face. She pretends to try to rub the blood out of her handkerchief until he pulls himself together.

"Did you get it all?" he asks unevenly. "I don't want to go back to the hospital wing."

"You're good. Here; do you hand."

"I'm going to die there." Harry rubs at the back of his hand with her handkerchief as though he wants to take his skin off.

"You're not going to die," Hermione says firmly.

"I should," he says. "You don't get it."

"No," she says, "I do. I know what you did." She's not going to say Neville's name if he won't. Harry doesn't even bother to blink back his tears this time. She finds herself patting his shoulders and telling him it's okay, it's okay, like her dad used to do when she fell off her bike or out of trees.

"It's not," Harry says. "I didn't mean to."

"It's okay," Hermione says again, but this time she sounds more like herself. "I'll figure it out."

Harry sputters from tears to a hollow laugh. "You can't _fix_ this, Hermione."

She will, though. Hermione's first spelling exam in primary school was a disaster that still makes her throat seize up. Her first Polyjuice Potion was traumatic. It doesn't matter; she knows better than to give up part-way through.

\---

Hermione is in the middle of trying to explain to Professor Dumbledore that she has to see Harry when Professor Snape brushes past the Headmaster and turns impatiently to her. "Well? Miss Granger? The Soothing Salve? Shall we see whether or not I'll have the pleasure of taking points for your poisoning of your--friend?" He makes it sound as though a friend were something unsavoury.

She has a little pot of it in her bag, but she didn't brew it. Salves are notoriously difficult and she's only made one once, in class, under strict supervision. Professor Snape knows it; he had plenty to say on the store-bought brand when she slathered it over her hand after stirring until it cramped. He's the one who suggested she hold onto it, though, in case of "further mishaps". She digs it out. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Professor Dumbledore crouch to talk to a small Hufflepuff, then, standing, lead the boy away after ruffling his hair.

She drops the Soothing Salve into Professor Snape's outstretched hand, and frowns when he pockets it. Hermione glances back at the now-empty doorway to the hospital ward.

"I thought you wanted that for Harry?" she asks, trailing him towards Madam Pomfrey's office.

"I am, thankfully, not presently required to do anything whatsoever for Mr Potter."

"But you said--"

"You're inferring. Two points from Gryffindor, Miss Granger. Albus carries a Sneakoscope far too often."

Hermione nearly trips over her feet. "So you don't think I'm imagining it. Why is Professor Dumbledore trying to keep me from visiting Harry?"

"For your own health and safety, most probably," says Professor Snape.

"He's been doing it all term."

"I'm aware." He pulls the door to Madam Pomfrey's office closed after glancing briefly around the empty office.

Hermione backs out of his way. "Can I have my Soothing Salve back now?"

"No," Professor Snape says. "Did you come to see Potter or to row with me?"

"I didn't know you'd be here," Hermione points out. "Madam Pomfrey's in the storage closet." The trailing hems of her robes are visible beneath the open door and her keys are in the lock.

"Lucky for you, then," he says. "Poppy!"

Madam Pomfrey rocks back on her heels and pulls her head out of the massive medicine cabinet. "I thought I heard your snarl, Professor. And Miss Granger."

"Miss Granger's in need of a new Soothing Salve. Hers will most likely give Potter a rash."

Hermione shoves her hands into her pockets and tries to look repentant instead of gaping at him.

Harry is groaning in his magicked sleep, his hair sticking to his sweaty skin. He twitches when she hugs him but doesn't wake.

\---

"The snitch! The snitch!" The chant roars in the stands at the Gryffindor-Slytherin game. The noise vibrates through the stands, the tremor of enthusiasm spreading through Hermione's body. On the pitch, Ginny raises one gloved hand in a tight fist of triumph. The cheer is deafening, sweeping Hermione to her feet when Hannah and Luna, packed in tightly around her elbows, rise.

Hermione finds herself automatically picking out familiar silhouettes in the sparsely-filled stands across the pitch: Draco's not missing, per se; he's in uniform, on a broom. Daphne's harder to spot, but her long dark hair tugs suddenly in the wind, giving her away. Professor Snape is standing on one of the upper risers, his arms crossed, though whether in disapproval or against the cold, Hermione can't tell. He turns his face towards her, squinting into the afternoon sunlight and looking directly at her. She's unprepared for the rush of injustice of a Gryffindor foul that goes unnoticed and stamps down firmly on the desire to shout, to scream, to throw herself down the riser steps to be there when young Mr Harper hits the turf, before he manages, somehow, to right his broom.

"Hermione," says Luna. Hermione has to wrench her head to the side in order to look at her. "You were somewhere else," Luna says. "Did you see strange lights and white craters? Where did you go?"

"Madam Hooch missed the Foul Number 611," Hermione says.

"I know," Luna agrees solemnly. "That was dangerous."

"The what?" Lavender laughs. "Since when do you even know what that is?"

"I must have read it somewhere," Hermione says, distracted, but Ron slams the quaffle that the announcer just called a "sure shot" away from the Gryffindor hoop before she finishes her sentence. Lavender is no longer listening. Hermione's ears ring with the roar of the crowd.

"I hate quidditch," Hermione shouts at Luna. She sticks her fingers in her ears, but that only creates the impression of being underwater.

"It's a good game for intellectuals," Luna shouts back. "Have you ever tried calculating the score in real time?"

Even without the snitch, Gryffindor wins the match by a comfortable margin and the game ends with the fans from the Gryffindor stands flooding onto the field. Hermione lets the surge tug her along; it's impossible to move against it. Hermione loses sight of Ron's red hair for a moment, before he's pushed up on someone's shoulders. Ginny hugs her, pressing a cold and sweaty cheek to Hermione's.

"Congratulations," Hermione says.

"Wasn't that a gorgeous game?" Ginny asks with feeling.

Hermione elbows her way to the edge of the group, where Kingsley Shacklebolt is shaking Madam Hooch's hand, surrounded by a small group of students waving Gryffindor scarves, including Susan Bones, who has her arm over Morag MacDougal's shoulders and a scarlet-and-gold scarf wrapped around them both.

"Good game," someone calls. Hermione turns, but the comment isn't addressed to her. Draco has a half-head advantage of height that does nothing for the noise; he is shouting to be heard by a teammate. Hermione can just make out his green-gloved hand through the sea of students. He cuffs the back of a Slytherin chaser's helmet.

The cheering crowd sweeps between her and them, following the Gryffindor team's slow progression off the field.

The celebration carries over through dinner and into the beginning of classes the next day. They have History of Magic with the Slytherins. There's never much intermingling; the Slytherins have always sat on one side of all of the classes they've had together since first year. Today, though, most of the desks in the middle row between the two houses are empty. Hermione takes the open seat between Daphne Greengrass and Tony Goldstein despite the fact that they are sitting farther back than Hermione usually likes to be.

"Is Marjorie Ward all right?" Hermione asks Daphne.

"Why wouldn't she be?"

"I saw the bludger she took to the ribs."

Daphne's eyes flit over her face for a long moment. "She's still in the hospital wing while the Skele-Gro sets. Why are you sitting in her seat?"

"Professor Binns isn't going to notice," Hermione says.

"Fine; but I want to copy your notes for Marjorie."

"I was going to offer," Hermione agrees.

\---

"Dark magic shrivels shrivelfigs," Hermione announces, waving the herbalist's guide she's just found that bit of information in. She's been through the potions classroom and tried the door to Professor Snape's office before finally daring to knock on the door to his rooms. It swung open at once when she gave her name.

Both Professor Snape and Professor McGonagall look up from the chessboard they are setting up. The pieces shuffle into their initial positions. Professor Snape is black.

"That's why you see them fixed over lintels in some of the more old-fashioned villages," Professor McGonagall says reasonably. "Perfectly unfounded, since they have to be touched, but I remember my grandmother's house..."

"Parents used to hang them in a newborn's cradle to prevent changeling magic, or so the legend goes," Professor Snape says.

"If the infant had been switched, they would supposedly shrivel," Professor McGonagall explains. "Oh--Severus, your poor mother. Pawn to e4."

"Can they still be used in Dark potions?"

"Dried, yes," Professor Snape replies. "E5."

"You've done that before," Hermione muses.

"King's knight, yes, you. Up to f5, sir."

"Brewed while tainted?" He sounds mildly surprised. "I have done, yes. Pawn--no, not you, you fool--bishop's pawn, all the way, if you please."

"Substituted dried shrivelfigs for fresh," Hermione specifies. "That sounds like a bad idea."

Professor McGonagall snorts. "Really, Severus."

He glances at the board. "It is. You'll learn."

"Why didn't you tell me this could happen?" Hermione says.

Professor Snape's face softens, though he's still frowning. "I might have done, had you told me what you were up to."

"Sit down, Hermione," Professor McGonagall says. "Stop distracting him or this game will be painfully short."

The armchair is too far away and seems too presumptuous. The only other place to sit is on the three-legged wooden stool stashed beside a tall wooden cabinet. Hermione carries it over. She tucks the book into her lap and folds her arms over her knees. Ron has made her play enough games that she can follow what is happening on the board without much trouble, though she's not much of a player herself. It's slow, because neither of the professors speaks except to order their pieces to the next square. In between moves they sit hunched over the board for long minutes. Professor McGonagall doesn't blink, like a cat; Professor Snape taps his fingers lightly against the edge of the table. He loses his reluctant pawn, then a knight, then another two pawns and a rook. Hermione sees Professor McGonagall eyes his remaining knight. Her queen could take it.

"I swear I've seen this game somewhere," Professor McGonagall says.

"You lose whenever you play sharp, Minnie," Professor Snape replies.

"And you risk everything for minimal gain. Go ahead, your majesty." The queen beheads the knight, who stages a dramatic death that sends his sword clattering across the board. "Check."

The black king looks up at Professor Snape. He merely points, and the king scurries off to the next square. Professor McGonagall draws her queen back to safety.

"Oh," says Hermione, "your rook!"

"Indeed," says Professor Snape with evident satisfaction.

Professor McGonagall grumbles and concedes defeat with bad grace. "Don't put this one on our tally. Should it really count if you're taking orders from Hermione?"

Professor Snape glances sideways at Hermione. "Am I, now?"

\---

Professor Sprout's class is less enjoyable now that she's also Deputy Headmistress. Hermione likes the class because, most of the time, the bookwork and essays are meant to be done on each student's own time, and Professor Sprout trusts them to do it. During the class hour, they usually meet in the greenhouses and fight over the pairs of dragonhide gardening gloves and poke around in the earth. Even when they are handling the poisonous and vicious varieties, plants are fairly straightforward. Hermione likes knowing when they bloom and how they seed and what they do. She's finally outgrown her discomfort with how little of herbology is written. Her herbology notebook has never been opened in class, though she lists everything she remembers from class every night while Harry and Ron do their other homework.

Since becoming Deputy Headmistress, Professor Sprout has less patience for Hermione's curious questions about potions and medicine and growth charms. Class is interrupted by discipline issues having nothing to do with seventh year herbology that end more often than not with Professor Sprout telling them not to touch anything, then bustling off to deal with whatever it is. Usually she's back before the end of the class hour; sometimes she isn't. The lessons are less interesting, too. Hermione recognizes the shortcuts she would have taken herself if she hadn't had enough time to prepare: the over-explanation, the narrower focus, the way they always have just a little too much time when they're repotting or clipping samples.

Sometimes it's just boring; today all they do is weed the gurdyroot beds. Hermione isn't certain that anyone else notices the Ravenclaw prefect who turns up part-way through the hour and disappears for ten minutes with Professor Sprout.

They put away their tools at the end of the hour and drop their gardening gloves in the bin. Ron slings an arm over Lavender's shoulders; they duck into the giant fern grove. The tall fronds close behind their passage and it's as though they were never there at all.

Draco jogs to catch up to Hermione as they leave the greenhouses. "You have to stop."

"Stop what?"

"People know you're still hanging around Professor McGonagall." Draco's sleeves are still rolled up, flaunting his bare arms. "It's not a good idea."

"You are such a prat," Hermione says. "You can't tell me what to do, even if you are a prefect."

He shakes his head. "Granger--wait, look." It's a Owl Post telegram card, which receives telegram text addressed to it from any other card. The Owl Post charges three sickles for the card, which is good for several months, and four knuts per word of five or fewer letters. Hermione's parents won't let her get one; supposedly, until she learns to be concise, it would be like throwing money down the drain. "Votes in. D named MfM by 15. Watch your back, pass the news. Talk over Hols. My best. Papa."

Draco thinks he's tough, but his hand is trembling a little.

"Okay," Hermione says slowly. "I could see how that would be bad for you and your friends."

Draco growls. "I know you think I love talking about myself," he says. "Goyle heard him say we can't know McGonagall wasn't involved in the incident in the muggle school last week--"

"The fire?" Hermione asks. There were pictures in the _Daily Prophet_. "That's ridiculous."

Draco nods. "And you're Potter's muggleborn friend."

"Tell me something I don't know," Hermione says.

"Okay," he echoes. "So that's it. I'm done. See you in Arithmancy."

Hermione has Ancient Runes next. When they reach the staircases, she goes up; Draco goes down.

\---

"I wish I weren't going home for Easter holidays," Hermione says. She's sitting cross-legged on Harry's bed while he and Ron finish their potions homework. "Mum wants to go to this showcase in Birmingham and I don't want to be a tag-along, but we're going to end up spending most of the first week in a hotel room."

"I'll be here," Harry says, closing his textbook on his finger and scooting up a little higher against the headboard. "Like always. You could stay."

Hermione shakes her head. "I really can't. They're my parents."

"Lav thinks if we both get jobs right out of school we can probably find a flat. Nothing posh, but I can't wait to get away from mine."

"If by nothing posh you mean a room," Harry says, "maybe off Knockturn Alley."

"I haven't seen my parents since Christmas," Hermione reminds Ron. "It's not like my mum and dad ever happen to be just passing through Hogsmeade or send me howlers so I can hear their voices."

Ron cringes. "Would you stop bringing that up? It was bad enough when it happened."

"Did you finish number four yet?"

Ron looks down at his parchment. "I have, 'Blue knotgrass is useful because of its inert properties.' Does it have to be more than one sentence?"

"Hermione told you to write that," Harry says. "Ugh, I still have a headache. You know Snape's homework rule: at least as much original thought as copying, or you fail."

"No one will know," Ron protests. "Hermione's homework sentences always have multiple clauses."

Harry takes off his glasses and squints at the lenses before closing his eyes and tipping his head back against the wall. "For all you know, Ron, that's a quote from our textbook."

"Is it?"

"No," Hermione says. "But Professor Snape said it twice last class."

"Hermione," Harry groans.

She grabs the wastebasket lodged between the desk and the bed and mostly manages to get it to Harry before he vomits. The black, viscous bile is not something that should be coming out of a stomach. The bit that missed the wastebasket burns the back of Hermione's hand and splashes Harry's trousers. Hermione wipes her hand on Harry's knee as he retches again. She rummages through the beaded purse for the Soothing Salve and has the lid open before Ron plucks it out of her hands.

"Don't put Salve on an open wound," he says. Hermione looks down in surprise at the broken blisters below her knuckles. It hurts, but not that much. Ron grasps her other wrist and pulls her off Harry's bed. "Both of you: hospital wing. Now."

\---

"Hermione," Harry says, frantically, pulling her into the Room of Requirement, which provides them with a literal broom closet. Row upon row of broomstands line the small room.

"Are we going somewhere? Because I'm not getting on a broom, even if you're flying," Hermione tells him. "And we're on holiday this weekend, so I don't--"

"No--Hermione!" Harry scrambles at his clothes, struggling with the zip of the hoodie he's wearing, then his with long-sleeved pajama shirt.

"Why are you still wearing your--"

There's a Dark Mark on Harry's left arm. The skin around it is red and raised. Hermione wants to scratch her own arm in sympathy.

"I swear I didn't do anything," Harry says, panicked. "You have to find a way to get it off."

"There isn't one," Hermione says. "It's supposed to be permanent."

"Well--find one!" Harry says. "I can feel Him. It's not just a Mark. It's like it's alive."

"Let me think," Hermione says.

Harry gulps. "Should we go to the library?"

She shakes her head. "There's nothing in the library. We're going to see Professor Snape first."

She has to drag Harry bodily with her down to the dungeons. He doesn't want to show anyone else. Professor Snape doesn't help matters by looking up sharply when Hermione knocks perfunctorily and opens the door to his office. "What have you gotten into now, Potter?" he snaps, barely sparing a glance for Hermione.

"Show him, Harry," Hermione says. Professor Snape frowns at her, as though she were a distraction.

"You tell him; you're the one... " Harry trails off.

"Is there reason for which you've intruded on my lunch hour?" Professor Snape asks.

Harry laughs a little desperately.

"He has a Mark," Hermione says, unable to stand the tension. "I think he woke up with it. Pull your sleeve up, Harry."

The order is useless; Professor Snape moves with a speed that surprises Hermione. He drops to one knee in front of Harry, grasping Harry's wrist in one hand and pushing his sleeves up with the other. "What happened?" he says. "Be precise."

Professor Snape's voice is pitched softly, in a tone that would make Hermione hoard her answers until she knows exactly what information he's prodding for, but Harry launches into a meticulous account beginning with getting ready for bed last night. Professor Snape listens patiently through the parade of details: the hole in the toe of Harry's left red sock, Dean's missing Sugar Quill, Ron using the last of the toothpaste, the thread Harry pulled out of the fraying hem of his pajama bottoms. Harry remembers nothing except that his arm itched sometime during the night, and then in the morning--this. He left his pajama shirt on because he was afraid Ron would see. He's been trying all morning, but he couldn't get Hermione alone until now.

"Is it real?" Harry asks.

"What do you think?" Professor Snape replies.

"Don't," says Hermione, already imagining the volley of questions that will likely follow.

Professor Snape runs his fingers over the Mark. The black snake ripples, following his hand. Harry shudders. "It's seeping Dark magic like any new Mark." He digs his thumb into Harry's arm until Harry makes a little noise of discomfort. "Yes, I can feel that, too. Don't whine, Potter; I shan't hurt you."

"What do we do, Professor?" Hermione asks.

Professor Snape climbs back to his feet and gives Hermione a thin-lipped, measured glare. "Why are you asking me?"

"Right," Hermione says. "Harry, it's your arm."

"I want it off," says Harry. "You can fix it, can't you?"

"I'm sure you could cut the arm off," Professor Snape says sardonically, tucking his hands into the sleeves of his robe as though to keep them out of the way. Hermione wishes she could ask if he aches to touch Harry's Mark the way she yearned to put her hands on the Book.

"Unless Voldemort knows something about his own Mark that we don't--and I shouldn't like to ask him--" Professor Snape continues, "I expect you'll have to learn to live with it, Potter, like the rest of us."

"I'll ask him," Hermione says, but she stammers over the last word in a long exhale. "If you want, Harry."

"If it comes to that, I'd rather you let me," Professor Snape says in a hard, brittle voice. To Hermione, he looks lost--and old.

"I can feel yours," Harry says. "I can feel all five of you in the castle. And Hermione's a muggleborn witch. Any of you might--"

"Harry," says Hermione.

"If you don't want anyone else to know," Professor Snape says, "then you'll stay far away from them for the rest of the week."

Harry nods miserably.

Hermione fetches a stool from the classroom and makes Harry sit so she can wrap her arms around him while he bites his lip and eventually leans back against her. It takes several minutes for Professor Snape to prod Harry into admitting that he's afraid of hurting someone else, and to prescribe quarantine in the hospital wing under Madam Pomfrey's watchful eye for the next several days or until Harry learns to differentiate between Dark Marks and the Imperius Curse, which Professor Snape believes ought to have been covered in fourth year Defence Against the Dark Arts. "Shall I conclude you cheated your way into achieving your OWL?" he asks.

Harry looks hurt, but vaguely less haunted.

"Professor?" Hermione says on the way out, Harry's arm tucked firmly in her own.

"What is it now?"

"I didn't touch anything. I could help. If you have to brew, and it's not, I mean--"

"I'm accustomed to managing alone, but I'll not forget you offered," he says, "should I have scut-work that wants doing."


	4. Interlude: Easter Holidays

Her parents always stand out a little bit. They never hang back like the rest of the muggle parents, and they never dress up to meet the Hogwarts Express like the wizarding parents. She picks them out of the crowd from the window of the train and waves to them to wait a moment as she climbs down to the platform.

She floats Rowena Borroughs's trunk off the train so that Rowena can throw herself at her father. She shakes hands with Mrs Borroughs and hopes her smile doesn't look too forced when Mrs Borroughs tells her, "It's such a pleasure to meet you, Miss Granger. You're almost as kind as Mr Malfoy's boy."

Hermione adjusts her schoolbag and collects her own trunk. She turns to watch Ron disappear with Ginny and Charlie, who has come to meet them. She takes another step backwards and bumps into a youngish, dark-haired man standing in the middle of the platform.

"I'm sorry," Hermione says as he reaches out to steady her politely. "I wasn't paying attention. Do you need help? Are you waiting for someone?" He's holding a printed book of timetables and looking about in a bit of a daze. He's maybe Bill's age; he could be anybody's older brother.

"Not exactly," he says. "Excuse me; I was in your path." His face is open and pleasant and currently full of private amusement.

It's the smile that does it, like the grainy, shadowed newspaper picture, and Hermione knows she's about to offend him, but she opens her mouth anyway: "Tom? Tom R--"

He claps a cold hand over her mouth and she has just enough time to note that the amusement is utterly gone from his expression before he catches her up against him and turns on the spot. The compression of Side-Along Apparition squeezes her out onto a brick walk in the sunlight in the middle of a deserted park.

"--iddle?"

"And you are?" he asks without releasing the grip he has on her arm. A gesture of his free hand secures her wand by magic, which he tucks into his own sleeve.

"Helena Graham," Hermione says.

He laughs, as though she's merely told a particularly good joke. "Try again."

He examines her face carefully as she considers lying again. The more she looks back at him, the less believable his appearance is. She has a sort of double vision of scales, like a fish or a snake, a missing nose, eyes the wrong shape and mouth too wide. "Hermione Granger. I can see through your glamour."

"Isn't that interesting," he says. "What am I going to do with you? You're a student. Do you have parents I need to deal with before they turn over heaven and earth looking for you?"

"Stay away from my parents."

"Oh dear. I've caught myself a mudblood. I could find them myself, of course." The glamour flickers and falls away. Hermione squeezes her eyes shut. "You're one of Minerva's cubs." His S's are strong and sibilant without the glamour. "You called me Tom. Open your eyes, sweetheart. I don't plan to hurt you."

\---

The house Voldemort takes her to is full of Death Eaters, presumably, but it's only a house. It's hard to imagine that the plump woman who rises from sorting the mail at a desk in the foyer could be a vicious blood supremacist, or that the man with the graying hair who make her an egg-and-cress sandwich in the yellow-tiled kitchen enjoys torturing muggles and blowing up gas mains. At the man's urging, she leaves her schoolbag under the kitchen table where it will be out of the way, but ties the drawstrings of her beaded handbag to one of her beltloops under her school robes.

There is nothing useful in Hermione's beaded bag, but she doesn't want it out of reach. She hasn't yet come up with an excuse to get a spare wand, which her allowance won't cover, at any rate. The Universal Base is not finished. She hadn't thought to plan for being kidnapped alone.

The front sitting room is filled with a selection of comfortable chairs and an enormous couch facing the fireplace. There's also a library, but whoever furnished it is not a reader. A thick dark snake is looped over itself and pressed up against the walls a large terrarium in the corner. The dining room and the steps to the cellar are shut behind doors, but Hermione's left to wander freely about looking at the portraits on the walls. They've all been hit with Silencing Spells, but one young lady with a hunting dog turns red in the face trying to shout at Hermione, and a staid gentleman with a lace ruff around his neck and rings on every finger of his hands leers and makes a rude gesture at her. Upstairs there are four bedrooms with floral wallpapers that match the different bedspreads.

People come in and out all afternoon. Most of them come by to offer some sort of a greeting to Hermione, but there are very few introductions. Everyone already seems to know one another. Hermione helps put plain white sheets on the beds and scrubs the bathtub with a sponge while the plump woman does the sink with her wand. Someone sends her to dust the bookshelves, so she goes, biting her tongue to keep quiet on a question about house-elves and housework. There's an antique-looking telephone in the library, hidden in one of the cabinets that Hermione opens. When Hermione picks the receiver up from the pronged cradle, there's a dial tone. No-one comes running to tell her to put it down, so she calls her mum's mobile using the rotary dial, which makes little clicks in her ear as it spins.

She should have called the house. Her mum is panicked and relieved and won't listen to a word Hermione is trying to say. "I'm fine," she keeps having to insist. "No, I don't know where I am--don't look for me, you won't--yes, it's magic, but--yes, I'm fine. No, I'm _fine_. Look, mum, I need you to do something for me. Can you get a message to--no, not the police. No, no-one's threatened me. I'm not hurt, but I don't think I'm supposed to be on the phone so can you listen? Tell Harry I'm--no, mum--they don't want money, mum--" The line goes fuzzy, then dead.

Hermione turns around, still gripping the receiver. No one's there, but she can't get a dial tone again, no matter how many times she depresses the cradle.

When she returns to the rest of the house, the dining room has been opened. The man with the graying hair and another, more heavy-set man are finishing putting the extra leaves in the table to lengthen it. The adults send Hermione back and forth from the kitchen to set the table. There aren't enough chairs--Hermione's laid out forty-eight places, which somehow all fit into the smallish dining room. Hermione suggests using the four from the kitchen, but a woman wearing a headscarf who seems to have just arrived transfigures more from kindling in the woodbox beside the fireplace in the sitting room.

The nagging question about the lack of house-elves is answered when Voldemort Apparates into the middle of the kitchen and everyone but Hermione scrambles to bow.

"Dully is cooking in the basement, my lord," the plump woman says, as if afraid of being reprimanded. "There were no other house-elves left."

"May I have my wand back now?" Hermione asks.

"Be patient, Hermione. Did you ring your parents yet?" Voldemort says.

"She didn't say anything about us to the tellytone, master," one of the Death Eaters answers for her.

"Out of curiosity, how long did the charm last?"

"Long enough," Hermione grumbles, before the implications of the question settle in. "You charmed a telephone to work? How? Was it hard?"

One of the Death Eaters snickers. Voldemort silences him with a single raised finger, whether by presence or by magic, Hermione doesn't know. "I'd like to make this a learning experience for us all," Voldemort says. "'Know thy enemy and know thyself...'"

"That's from chapter three," Hermione says, unable to resist. References ground her. They're either right or wrong; she can trust them.

"I rather think we're alike, you and I."

\---

After dark, Voldemort stands behind the chair at the head of the table and seats Hermione at his left hand. He rolls up his sleeve. "Touch it," he says. "Call our friends." Voldemort's Mark is deep red, like an open sore on his skin. When she hesitates, he grips her hand and presses it to his own forearm. Hermione screams. His skin is cold, but the Mark burns. She has plunged her hand into flames. She struggles to pull back, but Voldemort is stronger than she is. "You are not one of us. Until I have your enduring allegiance, my kindness is a gift. Don't forget."

The Death Eaters arrive in uniform robes, cloaked, gloved, and masked. The candle light reflects on their moon-white masks, turned towards her and Voldemort. Without a mask and still in the same clothes she wore to clean a bathtub, Hermione stands out, exposed. The table fills up from both ends. She examines the forty-six identical masks with growing apprehension. Daphne might be here. Professor Snape could be here. The houseguests from earlier are almost certainly here, but there's no way to tell, no way to distinguish the person from the persona.

It isn't a dinner, though they eat. It's a meeting. At Voldemort's question or command, the Death Eaters drop their spoons and knives and stand to report, with alacrity and varying displays of enthusiasm. Much of it is politics, but the rhetoric is frightening, particularly coming from behind the expressionless masks of a crowd with no individual identities. Sometimes it's pity she hears: pity for the muggleborn witches and wizards who can't help the misfortune of their birth, for the poor people who might have merits, but will never overcome their miserable origins. Sometimes it's disgust, as though non-magical blood in a human were an abomination. Where Hermione might have said, "like a rat," the Death Eaters say, "like a muggle".

"And," one Death Eater says, describing walking down the street in muggle Edinburgh, "before I could shake it off, it bit me."

"I hope you had that treated," her neighbour says.

Hermione is thankful no one asks her to participate in any of the conversation. She keeps her head down. She manages the soup, then pokes at the meat with her fork; her burnt hand won't curl around the silverware and she isn't going to ask Lord Voldemort to cut her food into bite-sized squares for her.

"Stand up," Voldemort says to her. _Sssstand up_. "Tell our friends who you are, and why you're here."

For an instant, Hermione imagines refusing. The scene that follows, even in her own head, involves a large cobra, hood flared, about to strike her face. She pushes her chair back and gets to her feet. All of the white masks turn towards her. "I'm Hermione Granger," she says in a small, reedy voice she's never heard from herself before.

"And why are you here?" Voldemort prompts.

Hermione looks down at him, confused. Because I'm Harry's friend, she thinks, because I wanted to talk to you and you appeared, because you're all mad and my parents are muggles, because you've kidnapped me, because I recognised you, because-- "Because you still have my wand," she says, but it comes out as something barely more than a whisper.

There's a ripple of suppressed amusement that runs down the table.

"Hold up your hand."

Hermione doesn't want to ask which one, so she puts up both, one smooth palm and one burnt one. There's no reaction from the expressionless masks.

"This is your enemy, my friends," Voldemort says. "An idealist, too young to understand how wrong she is. A mudblood, a Gryffindor. Have you heard her complain? Cry? I would richly reward any one of you who could stand, unarmed, at wandpoint in a circle of Dumbledore's knights as unflinchingly as this. Does your hand hurt, Hermione?"

"Yes," Hermione says.

One of the Death Eaters stands. "I say we torture her. My lord."

"Why sully yourself?" Voldemort asks. _Ssssully yourssself_. "What would I gain? Why not make her destruction serve our cause? Let's play a little game. Imagine, Hermione--" He strokes her arm with two cold fingers that don't feel human. "--that you are at our table of your own free will. Why would you be here? What would you want?"

It's an opportunity, so Hermione takes it. "Leave Harry alone. Take back your soul and your Mark and leave him alone."

There are more pointed teeth in Voldemort's mouth than there should be, row upon row of them. "I _am_ Harry Potter, or I will be. The world in which your Harry survives is my world.

"I would never ask anyone to do something against their nature. Here is what I will do with you, Hermione Granger: I will send you back to Harry Potter, to protect him. We need each other. Keep him alive for me."

Hermione wants his hands off of her. Her mind recoils. Every fiber of her body wants him away from her. She wants--there's a jolt of magic. She's standing three feet further back, the ghost-white warmth of her Patronus between herself and him.

There's finally a murmur from the table of Death Eaters, astonishment and interest and disbelief.

"Wandless protego? I might be interested in you, after all," Voldemort says. _Interesssted_. "Perhaps I'll send you back Marked as mine and take my sport watching you fend off the ones you love."

"I want my wand back," Hermione says, stronger now. Her Patronus is heat and light. It bares its teeth at Voldemort, but she can't _feel_ it, not the way she feels its presence on every nerve when she casts with a wand. She wants her wand. She wants her wand, but it stays in Voldemort's sleeve.

"You wear your allegiances for all to see," Voldemort continues, unperturbed. "You begged me to spare your parents. Look at you: Gryffindor colors, repulsive muggle clothes. Is that the Weasley family crest around your neck?"

Hermione wants to laugh. Her Patronus dims slightly. It's a struggle to keep it present when she can't feel it properly. Voldemort takes a half-step towards her. She pulls at the chain around her neck with her good hand until it comes free. Voldemort is close enough to see the silver snake in the silver grass.

"You have a patron?" he says. "Then it's already begun. I won't need force. Soon you'll come crawling back on your own, begging for my Mark. This is today's lesson, my loyal followers. No matter how base, nor how simple he is--never underestimate your enemy again. I will leave offenders in agony. Is that understood?"

Underneath the chorus of "yes, my lord" and "yes, master", she can feel the mental pressure he puts on her from the other side of the fading Patronus. Voldemort reaches for her. Hermione's Patronus puffs out with a wisp like candle smoke.

She _believes_ herself somewhere safe.

\---

Hermione is cold--cold and wet, and lying twisted on an uneven surface. It's not quite dark, not quite light, and the crisp air vibrates with the dawn chorus. Venus pulses through the tree branches. Her hand throbs. Not a dream, then. Hermione can identify some of the spring birdsong: wren, thrush, robin, and the dry clicking of a blackcap that hushes when Hermione sits up with a rustle.

Her wand isn't here. She hasn't splinched herself--there was no lack of determination, but she doesn't know where she's taken herself. It takes forever to unpick the knotted drawstrings of her purse from her beltloop with the numb fingers of one hand. She feels better as soon as she reaches inside the bag, though: a plastic bag for her dew-wet clothes, and clean set of shirt and trousers, and clean, dry socks. Hermione pulls both her own and Ron's warm jumpers over her head, awkwardly. Then there's the first aid pouch: antiseptic and plasters for her hand.

She picks a direction and walks. Improbably, once the forest thins into a town, she knows exactly where she is, deep in the Forest of Dean, where her parents used to bring her camping. There's a bus station, and that simplifies everything, even if it is Sunday. Hermione has maps and money. The first bus to Gloucester comes after nine, and then the train, for two hours to London.

When she lets herself in the front door, both of her parents come running. Her mum screams and her dad grabs Hermione's shoulders and shakes her, shouting. Hermione's never heard him raise his voice before, but now-- "Can you imagine what we've been through, young lady? Where have you been--and to come waltzing in here like that--"

She spends the afternoon in the police station sitting across from an inspector from the missing persons division and a youth psychologist until all three are equally frustrated. Hermione describes Tom Riddle as he appeared on the railway platform, but can't answer any of the other questions to their satisfaction, not where he took her, or how, or if he had a vehicle, how she managed to ring her parents, or how she escaped. She's too exhausted to lie, other than to keep insisting she doesn't know or can't remember until they don't believe anything she says. The inspector closes the file as a simple case of a runaway schoolgirl and the police psychologist recommends counselling. Hermione's parents look bewildered, much like they did when Professor McGonagall showed up with Hermione's Hogwarts letter, but that resolved itself quickly enough and this, Hermione knows, is going to be much harder to heal.

A Magical Law Enforcement agent appears at the door that evening, pronounces Hermione whole and safely "returned to her location of habitation", and Disapparates in front of their eyes.

\---

Her mum goes to Birmingham alone; they don't want to risk upsetting Hermione with a change of scenery. Her dad waits on her hand and foot, as though now that his anger is exhausted, he believes he can convince her to stay by pampering her. Hermione doesn't want to sit still long enough to think, and her dad is too eager to please; they spend the four days her mum is at the dentistry showcase in museums, looking at stone-age bone needles and Renaissance oil paintings and Victorian taxidermy of now-extinct species. It feels like anthropology instead of history: these are artifacts of a foreign culture, on display in a facsimile London where there is no war.

Her mum stays home with Hermione while her dad goes to Easter services for the first time since Hermione was much younger.

She goes through the motions as her hand heals. She draws up a schedule and makes herself write to Harry and Ron on the appropriate days. When she sits staring out her bedroom window at nothing, she tries to remember to open a book on her desk as though she were reading. She lies quietly in her bed with the lamp out during the night, though her parents almost certainly aren't fooled this time. She washes her hands before sitting down at the table and says coming, mum and please and thank you at the appropriate times. She asks her parents about their days and goes, once, to meet her mum at the no-longer-so-new clinic for lunch. "You won't--get lost, darling, will you?" her mum asks. "Perhaps someone should come with you."

"I could take the day off," her dad offers. "It's no hardship to escort my favourite ladies."

Hermione reassures her parents, but it's like talking to her mum on Voldemort's charmed telephone all over again. In every quiet pause in the conversations, there's Voldemort's voice in her head: _We're both sso ssssimilar_.

Her parents take her to Diagon Alley to replace her school supplies: a mass-reducing shoulder-bag that isn't as comfortable as her old muggle one, quills, notebooks, and only one used textbook--"I'm sorry," her dad says. "I don't remember even my medical texts being this expensive."--and, finally, a new wand.

Mr Ollivander raises his eyebrows in surprise. "Some young witches and wizards grow out of their first wand, but I remember you--vine, very rare, ten and three quarters inches with a core of dragon heartstring. Hard wand to grow out of, Miss Granger. Let's see what we have for you."

The process is painful. She can cast with anything he puts in her healing hand, but it feels off. "This one ought to do it," he says, presenting her with yet another long, narrow box. "A bit longer than you're used to, at fourteen inches, but--"

She can barely hold onto it, though she casts a perfect shower of glittering fluxweed blossoms before she drops it. "Not that one."

Hermione leaves with the least uncomfortable of them, a short, swishy blackthorn wand only nine inches long. "It's a rare treat to see a wand like that take to a witch outside the great pureblood families," Mr Ollivander says. Blackthorn, he says, has been a favourite in the Greengrass family for generations.

Hermione listens to her parents argue through her bedroom wall, drawn out discussions in civil tones in which they refuse to see each others' point. They never used to argue. Or was that a fairy-tale, too?

"--let her go back to school?" her mum asks. "We've always supported her idiosyncrasies."

"This is too much," her dad says. "But is she even prepared to take her A levels in subjects our universities offer?"

"Stop talking about it as though we've sent her to school abroad," her mum says. "It's only Scotland. We could have sent her to that French one, but we wanted a good British education for a reason, Wendell."

"Did you listen to the man in the wand shop? 'I've never seen a wand _take to_ someone outside the _great pureblood families_ '? Your daughter lives more in that absurd fantasy world than in Britain."

"She'll graduate in a few months," Hermione thinks her mum says, muffled by the wall.

"I don't know," says her dad.

She can't not go back; Voldemort still has her old wand. Her real wand.

\---

Hermione's parents insist on driving her up to school, of making a proper holiday of it since Easter hasn't been much of one. They spend three days at it, visiting Nottingham, passing through Leeds, and spending an entire day in the Lake District to avoid the congested roads after a tourism bus overturned on the motorway and weather made the immediate rescue and clean-up difficult. Hermione is so relieved to be returning to school that she pretends the report of low cloudforms doesn't make her think of Morsmordre, pretends she doesn't reflexively think of Voldemort every time the news comes on the telly in the hotels. Instead, she makes the extra effort to smile, to hang on her dad's arm on their walks, and to prod her mum into the bad dentist riddles her parents used to invent to keep Hermione occupied during long car rides: "Mum, what kind of award does a dentist get?"

"A little plaque, darling," her mum says, after a pause.

"What did the dentist see at the north pole?"

They reach the Hogwarts railway station in Hogsmeade shortly before the Hogwarts Express arrives from London. Mr Filch, Hagrid and the Heads of House are already there. Professor Flitwick is enlarging the platform while Mr Filch cordons off space for luggage. Professor Sprout is standing under the station clock where the hand for the Hogwarts Express is slowly approaching "arriving". She's gesticulating energetically as she speaks to Professor Snape, whose long, bony hands are clasped behind his back. Kingsley comes to greet Hermione and her parents.

He shakes Hermione's parents' hands and introduces himself. "You must be very proud of Hermione, Mr and Mrs Granger."

"It's Doctor Granger," both of her parents say, not quite at the same time.

"I beg your pardon," Kingsley says, and to Hermione's surprise adds, "Is that a doctor of medicine?"

Her parents explain. Hermione tries to work out whether Kingsley understands a word of what they're saying or whether he's an adept diplomat. Any definitive conclusion is lost under the whistle as the train pulls into the station and the ensuing din.

"Hermione!" Ron says, pulling her into a crushing hug. "You weren't on the train. Is that the new wand? It's tiny! Can I try it?"

Hermione passes it over, glad to be rid of the buzzing against her healing palm, however momentarily.

"Wingardium leviosa," Ron says, pointing it at his trunk. The trunk lurches. "Blimey," Ron says. "It's like trying to stuff a hippogriff into a shoebox. Hi, Dr Granger and Dr Granger."

He hands her wand back and she floats both of their trunks over to the growing pile of luggage. Hermione stands with her parents until the Heads of House have assembled their students, then she hugs them, promises to write, and joins Ron and Lavender for the walk up to the school.

"How were the hols, Hermione?" Lavender asks.

Hermione isn't quite sure what Lavender wants to hear, so she begins a detailed description of the educational exhibits at the Nottingham Galleries of Justice and lets Lavender conclude whatever she wants.

"Are you going to tell me what's wrong?" Ron asks when Lavender lets go of his hand to insert herself between Pavrati and Padma, who will probably have more satisfactory answers to Lavender's questions than Hermione does.

"Later," Hermione says. There's a sliver of possibility that he'll let her put it off indefinitely. "You didn't answer my last letter."

"That's what I mean," Ron says. "Thirty-nine hours between owls? For two weeks? Even you aren't usually that--" He ducks his head to chew on the cuff of his sleeve. "I know something's wrong," he says finally.

Hagrid drags the great doors to the foyer of the school open. He stands back, beaming, to let the stream of students pass.

"That's what I've been trying to tell you since last summer," says Hermione to Ron.


	5. Chapter 5

"You met him," Harry says, before even "hello". Over the holidays he's moved his belongings into the little closed-off room at the far end of the hospital wing that is usually only used for dragon pox patients. He looks to Madam Pomfrey for permission before he lets her in with him.

"You've moved into the hospital wing," says Hermione, stupefied.

"Look at me," says Harry. "I'm sick. Where else should I be?"

"With _us_. Because you're the Boy Who Lived, Harry." Harry's frown gets deeper and deeper as she talks, but she can't stop now. "Nothing can change that. I know it. I know you. Just a little more--"

"How did you meet him?"

"I ran into him at the station in London," Hermione says crossly, "and he invited me to dinner. How did you know?"

"Just like that, huh? I recognized you," Harry says, "when you touched his Mark. It's--he's--I want this _thing_ off of me. It's spreading. It's--."

Hermione nods. "I don't think he's trying to kill you, at least."

"Uh-huh. He didn't kill you, either."

"He wants to use me," Hermione says. "He's not going to kill people who do the things he wants. He's not--" She casts about for the right word and settles, reluctantly, on "--reckless."

"You wouldn't know. How would you know? It's not like he's in you, turning you into a--," Harry breaks off suddenly. "I don't want to talk any more." He turns his back on her, shrugging off her attempts to entice him back to the Great Hall for dinner.

"You haven't even seen Ron yet, have you?" she asks.

"You go. I don't want to see Ron."

"Yes, you do," Hermione says. "You don't want to explain why you're camping out in the hospital wing."

"You don't want to tell Ron what he said to you. You don't want to tell Ron _any_ of it."

That's not false, but--"Harry!"

"Go away, Hermione."

Hermione stares at him for a moment. She hugs him from behind while he stands stiffly, neither accepting nor rejecting, and wonders what she's supposed to say when Ron asks her why Harry's not at the feast that marks the beginning of their last term at Hogwarts.

\---

What Ron actually says is, "Saved you a seat, Hermione. So Harry's still in the hospital wing?" and that's easy, because all Hermione has to do is say "yes" and "thanks" and climb over the bench to sit where he indicates. She's just in time to hear Professor Dumbledore clap his hands for their attention.

"This spring brings many changes to Hogwarts," Professor Dumbledore says, smiling down at them all. "And to wizarding Britain. I expect many of you have already heard that I have taken up the position of Minister for Magic, a great honor I am sure I don't deserve. While this does mean you will see less of me and more of Deputy Headmistress Sprout--"

"Herbology is going to suck," Ron says, kicking Hermione's ankle for emphasis.

"--that I am entirely at the disposal of all of my students--"

"If I skip class for the whole term, can I still take the N.E.W.T.?"

Hermione considers before answering. "Well, no one _has_ yet, but I can't remember seeing anywhere that you _can't_. Pomilda Vattice set a precedent in 1463 when she achieved four--or was it three?--Masteries with no formal schooling."

"--of ministry officials in these halls, for both ministry and school business. I ask you to give them your warmest welcome. I would also like to remind you that, despite recent political events, duelling is still not permitted in the corridors of this institution. Furthermore, any student, Slytherin or of any other house, suspected of--"

"The corridors?" Ron repeats, affronted. "You can't use any of the really flashy duelling spells in a corridor, anyway."

Hermione kicks him back. "Shh!"

"--immediately brought before an evaluation committee to determine--"

"Suspected of what?" Hermione asks.

"Ron was talking," Lavender says.

"--first concern is your safety. You are the eyes and ears of this school. Your instincts are enhanced by your magic. I have therefore placed a letterbox outside my office. If you feel something is not as it should be--"

Ron pokes Hermione again. "How long before someone reports Malfoy for being a prat?"

Hermione shakes her wand from her sleeve, nearly dropping it as the motion produces a wand shorter than her muscle memory expects to catch, and casts a Do-Not-Disturb spell. She can hear both Ron and Professor Dumbledore's voices, but at a benign distance. The sound washes over her without so much as a ripple.

\---

There's a girl sniffling in one of the stalls when Hermione steps into the girls' toilet after Arithmancy and Ancient Runes, her first two classes. Hermione eyes the stall door in the mirror above the sink. "I'd keep my eyes on my own reflection, if I was you, dearie," the mirror says. "With hair like yours. She didn't look much better when she shut herself up in there, neither."

"Shut up," the sniffler says.

"Silencio," says Hermione to the mirror. "You can come out now."

The lower form girl who emerges looks like she's tussled with Devil's Snare. "I didn't do anything," she says impetuously. "I only ended up pushing Lindy because they wouldn't stop calling me harmful, and they flushed my tie. It's not my fault that was when we got caught."

Hermione examines the girl with her hands on her hips. "That's why I always carried a spare, my first year. No one liked me at all."

The girl sniffs again. "But that was my spare, and my Head of House said that it was the last one."

"Your Head of--which House are you, at that?"

The girl flinches. "Slytherin. But the hat said I could be Hufflepuff or Gryffindor but I liked green the best so I said I wanted to be Slytherin. Please don't ask me any more questions."

"Then tidy yourself up," Hermione says, rifling through her beaded handbag for a flannel and a comb to offer the girl. "Do you really think Professor Snape is going to punish you for losing a tie?"

It's the wrong thing to say. "He said if I wasn't careful I'd have detention until I'm a sixth year or until I learnt to be responsible, which he doubts will be before that. I'm already in trouble with Dumbledore, and you're a Gryffindor, and he's going to be so disappointed." She's crying again.

Hermione rolls her eyes.

"You can't ask me any more questions."

"Why not?" Hermione says, even as she recognizes the babbling as a symptom. "Oh, honestly, did someone give you veritaserum? How much did you take?"

The girl is hiccoughing through a compulsorily truthful answer. "Because I can't stop answering them and it was the evaluation committee and I didn't do anything! I don't know but I drank the whole cup of lemonade because I was scared. They were all wearing ministry pins and they all looked like they were just going to be cross with me and--"

"Don't say anything else. We're going to see Professor Snape."

"I don't want to see Professor Snape!" the girl protests. "He's going to be furious, and you'll be furious because you're Hermione Granger and you'll be late to class."

"To potions class with Professor Snape," Hermione specifies. "You can't stay in the girls' toilets all day, and if you don't come with me, you _will_ make me late to class. I'll tell Professor Snape why, too," she adds, a little maliciously.

The Slytherin girl trails her to the dungeons, still sniffling, one hand clamped firmly over her own mouth.

\---

"Miss Granger," says Professor Snape, his voice dripping with disapproval. "And Miss Higgleberry. Haven't you an Astronomy class to attend, or have you somehow skipped several years of school without my noticing?"

Miss Higgleberry looks at Hermione with wide, pleading eyes, her hand still over her mouth as she says, "I haven't skipped anything, Professor, not intentionally. I'm supposed to be in Astronomy, but it hasn't started yet and Hermione Granger said I had to come with her even though she's just going to get me in trouble with _every_ one and you said I was going to have to scrub--"

"That's quite enough," Professor Snape says. "Go wait in my office, and I'll deal with you as soon as the seventh years have started their potions." He propels her gently towards the office with a brush of fingertips against her shoulder and turns to Hermione, mouth tight and thin. "You will rue the day you met me, Miss Granger, if I find you had anything to do with this."

The menace in his voice makes Hermione shiver. She believes him. She swallows, then squares her shoulders. "Fortunately for me, I only found her sniffling in the girls' toilets."

Professor Snape pauses as she stops at the workstation she is sharing with Dean in Harry's absence. "In that case, I believe I have items that belong to you, should you like to come collect them after class."

"Those of you," he tells the rest of the class when he arrives at the front of the room and turns to scowl at them, "who have not yet amassed the minimal skill necessary to complete today's exercise will have the pleasure of never having another potions class with me again. A pleasure which, I assure you, will be mutual."

Hermione already has her hand up.

"Miss Granger, you cannot possibly already have a question. Page four hundred and seven, if you please. The instructions are on the board. I suggest you waste no time in getting started. You'll need an average of forty-two minutes to brew, which only leaves you with eighteen for both preparation and tidying up. Yes, Miss Granger?"

"Does this mean we'll start wand work next class?"

"If you don't begin today's potion," he says smoothly, "you'll never find out. Mr Nott, there is no _running_ in my classroom, even if I applaud your eagerness to reach the storage closet first."

"Yessir," says Theodore.

Professor Snape retreats to his office as soon as they've all lit flames under their cauldrons, warding against listeners with a gesture Hermione is familiar with, but leaving the door open. Today's potion is potion number 129, an étude, an exercise potion for students which nevertheless makes an impressive detergent. The potion isn't hard. It's varied, and requires precise organization. Hermione finishes measuring the powdered lionfish spines during the first stage of simmering, and realizes she's ahead of nearly everyone else in the room. It's going to be a class-hour of constantly hurrying to complete the next step, of filling the natural down times between steps with preparation for the ones that follow. She counts out sprigs of wormwood with her left hand while stirring with her right.

"You forgot the to de-pod the moonseeds," Dean says.

"I'll do that whilst it's cooling after the lionfish spines burn off," Hermione says absently.

"Oh, that's a good idea. That's not a Kwik Kauldron, is it? How are you so far ahead?"

"Honestly, even if you thought I'd trust anything that came out of a Kwik Kauldron, would Professor Snape let us brew anything in one?"

It takes Hermione exactly forty-two minutes to brew, but she's only used two minutes outside of brewing time to prepare. She bottles the sunny-yellow potion and labels the bottle. She deposits it in front of Professor Snape on his desk, next to the other yellow potion already there--she's not the first to finish--and casts a sideways glance at his office on the way back to her workstation. It's empty. She cleans the cauldron and the utensils she used and returns them to their places.

At the end of the hour, there's the usual pile of half-scrubbed cauldrons by the sinks, and the typical rush of students on their way to lunch. Hermione wipes down Dean's side of the workstation and dries her hands on her robes as she approaches Professor Snape's desk. There's an impressive array of potions covering most of the colors of the spectrum lined up along the front edge of the desk.

"You said you have something of mine, Professor?"

"Don't look at me like that," he says as she follows him into his office. "I haven't got your wand." He reaches under his desk and produces her schoolbag, holding it out to her by the strap. The front pocket is raggedy from the failed Undetectable Extension Charm. There's a small hole in the bottom corner of the main compartment and the strap looks more worn than she remembers. "You were supposed to be safely on holiday, and still I'm cleaning up after you," he says.

"You brought my books back," she says, inordinately pleased despite the absence of her wand which still aches, somewhere in the back of her mind. "And you never clean up after me. We'd have no points left if you did."

"Pity," he says bitterly. "Albus merits no less. If Minnie were still your Head of House, I'd be sorely tempted to take fifty from you for insubordination, and let her restore them to your classmates later."

It takes her a moment to figure out what Professor Dumbledore has to do with anything. "Professor Dumbledore gave a--is she a first or second year?--veritaserum in front of a disciplinary council? Is he--how can he do that? Is she all right? Veritaserum is proven to have unpleasant secondary effects when used with pre-adolescents. For example, in 1994 it was shown that--"

"If you're lecturing me, I shan't hesitate to relieve the great house of Gryffindor of actual points."

"Oh--you're angry." She can tell: the lines of tension in his posture, the thin mouth, that particular tone of voice.

"Irrelevant. Albus has always done whatever he pleases, which you ought to know by now, as it's the only reason you and your friends haven't been expelled several times over. Miss Higgleberry will be all right. On that note--are you?" he asks, suddenly grave. "Besides the hand, which I see you've at least had the sense to take care of properly."

"Were you there?" she asks. If he was there he should said something. He should have shown her she wasn't alone. It didn't matter how. "Why didn't you do anything?" She sounds ridiculous with her trembling voice. "Nevermind. I'm sorry." Her horrid voice cracks on the apology for the absurd question.

"You--" Professor Snape says, terse and clipped. "That night, I saw a witch of admirable poise and enviable power. Tell me, if you please, precisely what you think I could have added." He grasps the doorknob, but it's only to wrench the door open wider, an invitation for her to leave.

"Thank you for my books," she says.

"Keep better track of them next time," he replies, "and you'll have no need to thank me."

\---

Daphne catches her sleeve in the corridor between classes and drags her bodily into one of the unused classrooms. The sign on the door said, "Pixie decontamination. Keep out."

Hermione looks around uneasily at the upended desks and emptied bookshelves. "Should we be in here?"

"We won't be long. Do you know how hard you are to catch alone?" Daphne asks. "You're either in class or with Weasley."

"Lavender's with Ron a lot more than I am," Hermione says.

Daphne crosses her arms. "My parents were in Ireland for the holidays."

"You weren't?" Hermione asks.

"You weren't, either," Daphne says defensively. "My sister and I were with my aunt."

"So? What did your parents do in Ireland?"

"I don't know," Daphne says. "They've got friends, wizards called Campbell, who let them stay on their property a lot. What'd you do in Wales?"

"Went camping," Hermione says stiffly.

"Liar," Daphne says, smiling now. "My mum said you're worth four of her. Thanks."

"For?" Hermione asks.

Daphne shrugs. "They left me behind because she was mad at me. For the medallion. But now she's chuffed. You did something."

"No," Hermione begins.

"You don't have to tell me. Just--thanks, whatever it was."

"I'm going to be late for class."

"Uh-huh," Daphne says sagely. "And the world would end if you were late. Yeah, okay, we're done."

\---

The final base shimmers, opaline, a pearly sheen on the meniscus of the surface. Hermione chews her lip. The instructions described it as "incandescence." This looks more like irradiation to Hermione.

"What's wrong with it now?" Professor Snape asks from his desk with a sigh. He pushes himself to his feet to come inspect her work.

"The instructions are too vague again," Hermione says. "I can't tell if there's enough armadillo bile or too much in this one."

"Of course they're vague; they're meant for a significantly more experienced brewer than you're likely to ever become," Professor Snape says. He examines the fluid potion as it drips in strings from the clean stirrer he dips into it, leaving no trace behind on the glass rod. "I imagine you'd prefer to work from a recipe so precise that every relevant variation is taken into account: the size and temperature of the room, the number of times the cauldron's been scrubbed, the dexterity of--or even the last spells cast by--the brewer..."

"That would be tedious," Hermione concedes.

"I see no obvious reason to think your base contains too much bile. You'll have to test it properly."

Hermione grimaces. "I've been working on this since September."

Professor Snape snorts. "I strongly advise you to strike potioneer from your list of potential careers, then. You wouldn't suit, and you'd never make a mastery."

He hovers while she bottles the base, still and silent enough at the edge of her peripheral vision that she's aware of the slight sounds and motions of his breathing.

"I'll expect your proposed test on my desk later this week," he says. "My lord and master asked after you."

Hermione fumbles the stopper. "What did you tell him?"

"Give me that," he snaps, collecting both the stopper and the bottle from her. "There's no need to be stoic; you'll be much worse off if you spill this. And I doubt there was much behind the question; I merely said that you're well enough."

Without something to occupy her hands, Hermione finds herself pressing her fists over her mouth.

"How you deal with it is none of my business," he says bluntly, "but you ought to."

"He said I was like him," Hermione says, because it has to come out. Better Professor Snape than Ron, who still doesn't know. "What if he's right?"

Professor Snape sets the stoppered bottle aside. "Then deal with your own shortcomings through petty cruelties, as he would. I already told you it's none of my concern."

\---

Hermione receives the summons at breakfast with the Owl Post. If it weren't for the ridiculous Ministry letterhead, it would look like nothing so much as the invitations her parents occasionally receive to their friends' children's weddings: it's the centred, ornate text on embossed cardstock. "The Hogwarts disciplinary evaluation committee hereby requests your presence on Tuesday, the 5th day of May," it begins. In short, she's to report to the Headmaster's office after her classes the following day.

The committee is Professor Dumbledore, flanked by two Ministry officials, a curly-haired woman in pink, and a round-faced man. There is a single chair in front of the Headmaster's elongated desk, which serves as a juror's bar.

"Place your wand on the desk, please, and state your name for the record," the woman says as Hermione shuts the door behind her. Once she obeys, Hermione is granted permission to sit and offered a glass of pumpkin juice. It's cloyingly patronizing.

"What record is that?" she asks.

"Your Hogwarts record, which will be kept with your official record, criminal or otherwise, in the Ministry archives."

"And will it contain a mention of the veritaserum in this pumpkin juice?"

The woman sputters; Professor Dumbledore says cheerfully, "If you'd like it to, certainly, though I recommend you drink it down regardless."

What follows is a succession of seemingly disjointed questions about who spoke to whom at mealtimes and why she's so far ahead in the assignments on the Transfiguration syllabus and why she's elected not to continue Muggle Studies. She's intrigued by the compulsion created by the veritaserum, but at least the need to give exhaustive answers is easy enough to overcome; she does it all the time. She doesn't hold herself back regarding Muggle Studies. She's never felt the need to examine that particular decision before and:

"Well, there really wasn't any point," she hears herself telling the examiners. "I felt my ability to pronounce the names of muggle appliances was sufficiently developed, and that trying to correct the texts based on my own or my parents' experience wasn't very helpful to the other students. Usually I would have listed the pros and cons, but my decision was already made. I already had to get special permission for nine N.E.W.T. classes, anyway, so something had to be dropped one way or another, and Muggle Studies is least likely to serve me in the future in the wizarding world."

They let her reason for another three or four minutes, while Professor Dumbledore's expression becomes increasingly cheerful, before the official to Professor Dumbledore's left cleans his glasses with the edge of the sleeve of his robes and tells her that will do.

"What is this about?" she asks. "Have I done something wrong?"

"That is for us to determine," the woman in pink says. "Not for you to speculate about. You associate with Draco Malfoy, a known Death Eater. Why?"

Hermione can't tell whether the compulsion to blurt the truth is her own or the serum's. "Draco isn't a Death Eater," she says. "He rolls his sleeves up in Herbology every single time; he can't possibly be hiding the Dark Mark. Anyway, I don't associate with him. I avoid him whenever possible; he's always been stuck-up and--" She's planning to say "unkind" or "unfriendly" or something of the sort, but she can't get the word out. "Rude" doesn't work, either.

"And?" the woman asks, leaning forward as though fascinated by Hermione's sudden inability to speak.

"And he irritates me," Hermione finishes. "I don't like him."

The questions float back to whom she's sent letters by personal owl and what the last books she's taken out from the library are, if she's ever met with Professor McGonagall outside of class while she was Hermione's Head of House, and whether or not she believes the school policies should be respected. It's all so very mundane and aimless that it makes Hermione nervous.

"Do you want to tell us about your necklace?" the man asks.

"No," says Hermione, entirely truthful, then heaves a mental sigh and does so anyway, before they can ask her about it directly. "It's a silver medallion. No magical properties."

"Where did you get it?"

"Daphne Greengrass gave it to me," she says, successfully convincing herself that why and when and where are really not of interest.

"Are you and Daphne Greengrass... close?"

"No," says Hermione.

The pink lady clears her throat. "That is to say, romantically involved?"

"No," says Hermione again.

"What else can you tell us about the medallion?"

"It's the Greengrass family medallion..." It's easy to tamp down on the rest by telling herself it wouldn't be the truth, since she has nothing more than suppositions to work with.

"Are you aware of the significance of a wizarding family medallion, Miss Granger?"

"No," Hermione says. "But if I'm in trouble for wearing one, would you tell me?"

"I'd expect you to know better than to wear a wizarding artefact you know nothing about," Professor Dumbledore chastises her.

Hermione opens her mouth to apologize and finds she can't say that, either.

"Are you aware that the Greengrass family are known Death Eaters?" She certainly does now.

They make her angry enough that she starts trying to defend Daphne, pushing at the compulsion, finding little ways not to lie, exactly, because she can't, but--in the same way that she can convince herself she doesn't need to give ten-minute answers to a yes-or-no question--she can also add irrelevant information in misleading places, suggesting that Daphne is more concerned about classroom safety for muggleborn classmates than anyone in the castle actually is, and that Hermione thinks the medallion was a bribe for class notes in History of Magic.

Then they start on Harry, reviewing every incident since first year, including some Hermione has forgotten, and several she wasn't aware anyone but she, Harry, and Ron knew about. They suggest parallels between Harry's misbehaviour and the presence of Dementors, the successive problems with Defence professors, the infiltration of the school by a werewolf, a meeting with Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries, and the increase of alienation of muggleborn students in the school. Hermione tries to explain the difference between concurrent events--even correlated events--and cause-and-effect, but the Ministry officials stare blankly at her while Professor Dumbledore smiles benignly.

"We," the round-faced man finally says, "the Hogwarts disciplinary evaluation committee, advise that you be put on immediate academic probation for insufficient dedication to your schoolwork and excessive association with dangerous anti-muggle factions. We cite your refusal to continue Muggle Studies and your insufficient research on magical artefacts, as well as your liaisons with Draco Malfoy, the Greengrass family, Minerva McGonagall, and Harry Potter. Your right to continued education at this school will be granted or revoked pending study of this case by the Heads of the school and its board of governors. That will be all."

"Thank you for your time, Miss Granger," Professor Dumbledore says, standing to hold out a hand for her to shake.

Hermione leaves the office shaking with rage, enough so that she misses one of the steps and slides down the last few on her hip under the gargoyle's watchful eye. Professor Sprout and Professor Snape are waiting at the bottom of the steps, deep in conversation that stops abruptly when Hermione appears. Professor Sprout offers her a hand to help her stand.

"What trouble have you gotten yourself into now, Miss Granger?" Professor Snape asks in the nasty voice he uses to goad the lower form.

"Academic probation," she tells him with perfect, compelled honesty, "and veritaserum." She flees to the library until the effects wear off.

\---

Family medallions, according to _Modern Genealogy of Magic_ , are rarely seen outside the twenty-eight oldest pureblood families today. Hermione checks the publishing date on the flyleaf--1931. Given to each legitimate child at birth, most adults gift theirs to their children, lovers, close friends, or allies, adopting instead other signs of family allegiance. The exchange of family medallions is an archaic, romantic gesture. It can also seen as a symbolic declaration of alliance between--

"Hermione, what's all this?" Ron interrupts ten minutes before the library closes and waves Madam Pince away when she hushes him. He does lower his voice, though. "One of the house-elves has been threatening to throw me out of the castle and box my ears if I don't leave you alone for the past two hours, and then Professor Snape took points for loitering in front of the library."

Hermione lies, just for the pleasure of being able to do it again: "I don't know. Say, does your family have a medallion?"

"Yeah," Ron says proudly. "I have it somewhere. But you can't scry for previous owners; Mum had to have new ones made for half of us when we were born."

He agrees to let her follow him back up to the room he shares with Dean (and Harry, a corner of Hermione's mind insists, even if there's nothing left in the room to show for it). He digs the Weasely family medallion up from the far corners of his trunk for her, which takes longer that Hermione thinks is possible and makes her suspect an Extension Charm. Finally he holds up a roundish circular medallion of about the same size and shape as Daphne's. It represents a ferret-like animal salient regardant over what looks like a clutch of carrots.

"I think Fleur has the original one now," Ron says. "I can't believe Mum let her have it after she thought the weasel was a fox."

"It kind of looks like a ferret to me," Hermione admits.

"Weasleys can't draw," Ron says. "Never could. But--a fox? Bill's a sentimental sod who's ruined the Weasley name for the rest of us. You should have seen Percy's face when we learned Bill'd given it to her."

"Isn't that what you do with them?"

"No, ugh," Ron says. "Unless you're positively ancient, like older than Dumbledore, even. Not even Ginny wears hers. Why?"

Hermione shows him the one she's wearing, and he rocks back on his bed laughing.

"The Greengrasses? Seriously? How'd you pull that off? Can I tell Charlie? Please?"

"No," Hermione says.

"Come on, Hermione--please? I bet him Bill wasn't the last stuffy pureblood clinging to family medallion symbolism. He couldn't possibly be. Charlie owes me three galleons and interest if I can prove it."

"No," Hermione says. "I don't care about your stupid bet with Charlie."

\---

"Malfoy," Hermione says, slamming her books down next to him in Arithmancy.

"Why are you sitting next to me?" Draco asks suspiciously.

"Not because I want to, obviously," Hermione says, kicking her schoolbag under her chair and setting up her coloured quills and inks the way she likes them. "I'm on academic probation because we're friends."

"News to me," he says, nudging her blue ink out of line.

Hermione grimaces at him and sets it back in place. "Professor Dumbledore's disciplinary committee thinks you're a Death Eater."

"You think that's news to me? Oh, I'm scared," Draco says. He tears off the corner of the page of his notebook, crumples it into a ball and flicks it at her with a gesture of his wand.

Hermione bats the miniature projectile away. "Well, I told them you weren't."

"See?" says Draco. "This is why we're best of mates. Maybe if you ask nicely I'll help you study your way back into good academic standing."

"Because you're a model student."

"I am," Draco says as Professor Vector sweeps in and makes her way to the front of the room, stopping to charm Tracey Davis's schoolbag out of the aisle. "Top of my house, second in my form, and a prefect. It's hard to beat that. Library this evening?"

"I can't. I have to--"

"Shh," Draco hisses. "Good academic standing, remember? Come anyway. And no talking in class."

\---

"So," Draco says, pushing out a chair with his foot for Hermione at the table in the back of the library. He's set up an impressive spread of arithmancy texts, as though he's doing nothing but studying innocently with Daphne. There's a Speak Softly Sphere in the middle of the array, a favourite of Madam Pince's for students doing group work, since it keeps their voices down to an indistinct murmur to anyone not sitting at the table with them. "We've been doing some research. My father and Greengrass's mother are both on the board of governors. Apparently Dumbledore can keep you on probation for as long as he wants, but other than leaving a big black strike on your official record, he can't do anything else without the collusion--is collusion too big a word for you, Miss Probation?"

"Leave off, Malfoy."

"Fine, without the _collaborative approval_ of both your teachers and the board of governors. That means you won't be expelled, and you'll graduate with the rest of us, so long as you can keep the professors and the governors on your side. Unless, as Minister, Dumbledore manages to get the statutes changed, without consulting the governors, before you graduate..."

"We've both spoken to our parents," Daphne says plainly. "You should get letters of recommendation from all of your professors if you can."

"If I can!" Hermione sputters indignantly.

Daphne crosses her arms and leans against the back of her chair. "You didn't see the probation coming, and Malfoy all but warned you."

"I think I'd notice if Professor Dumbledore turned the professors against me."

"Or maybe they're all too scared of Professor Snape for it to show until you push them," Daphne sniffs. "How are you still so ridiculously naïve?"

"Why would anyone be scared of Professor Snape?"

Draco shrugs. "Maybe no one is. Well, other than the first years. And maybe I'm lying when I say he's the reason I'm still--clean."

"What?" Hermione says. "How?"

"My godfather can be very persuasive." Draco turns a page in one of the open arithmancy books. "It's good to have a powerful patron."

"You defended us to Dumbledore whilst under veritaserum," Daphne says, staring at the arithmancy text with a convincingly studious expression.

"Don't forget about wandless protego _and_ apparition," Draco says, pointing at a paragraph that, from Hermione's upside-down perspective, looks like the Nilakantha Equation, one of the first attempts to solve a temporal paradox.

Daphne grins at her, showing teeth. "One good turn deserves another."

"So now you're ours, or we're yours, or however you want to think of it," Draco says. "Get used to it."

She still doesn't have to _like_ him. "That equation was proven wrong _centuries_ ago. Honestly, couldn't you have bothered to pick a realistic selection of books?"

Daphne's smile is a lot less predatory. "This tutoring session is actually going to bring my marks up, isn't it?" she asks, as Madam Pince puts her hand on the back of the empty fourth chair to check up on them, making Hermione jump and knock her pencil case of quills to the floor.

"Then we should be looking at _Complex Chaldean Calculations_ instead," Hermione says, shooting a glare at Draco before bending to gather the scattered quills.

\---

Professor Snape is waiting for her in the corridor. "We're going to see Minnie," he says.

"I thought we were going to work on bundling?" Hermione asks.

"We are, though I intend to get a chess game out of it. Preferably one I will win, if you can keep at least half of her attention on bundling."

Hermione looks curiously over at Professor Snape. "Isn't that cheating?"

The corner of his mouth curls as he meets her eyes. "I wasn't aware it was against the rules of chess to discuss a subject of interest to all parties before a game."

"Bundling," Professor Snape says when Professor McGonagall opens her door. He pushes past her.

"Bundling!" says Professor McGonagall. "What about 'good evening, Minerva, I thought I'd drop by with Hermione to keep you company'?"

"Good evening, Professor McGonagall," Hermione says contritely.

"Not you," Professor McGonagall tells Hermione. "I already know you have manners. To what do I owe this visit?"

"I want to learn about bundling," Hermione says. "Professor Snape wants to play chess."

Professor McGonagall laughs so hard she has to dab at her eyes with a tartan-bordered handkerchief.

Bundling has been a vague and complicated concept in all of the potions texts that Hermione has found. Even Professor Snape's rudimentary explanation last week fell flat. "That's because it's not properly potions work," Professor McGonagall explains. "It's essentially aggregate transfiguration applied to potions."

"Oh!" Hermione says. "We covered the principle last term. Hester Gamp discovered the possibility of multiple essences during her work on the Principle of Artificianimate Quasi-Dominance, but it applies to objects, rather than animate beings. The concept involves taking disparate objects and transforming them into one hybrid that retains the attributes of all of its parts, which Gamp expressed as being the sum, sigma, of the set T as being equal to exactly the total of all the transformed elements in T and was proven only recently by--oh, I've forgotten his name."

"I'm pleased to learn I'm not the only one you feel needs to benefit from your extensive expertise in our chosen fields," Professor Snape says dryly.

"Sorry, Professor."

"Don't be," Professor McGonagall chides. "It's flattering to know you're interested. The important part, I think, is going to be how potions work differs from pure aggregate transfiguration exercises, rather than how to apply the theory we learned in class to an actual transfiguration."

It's fascinating in a way potions never is for Hermione. Transformation follows magical laws exactly, whereas potions has always seemed somewhat unpredictable to her, resembling chemistry here and actual magic there, sometimes retaining the properties of its ingredients, sometimes rendering them irrelevant. When she thinks of it as aggregate transformation, some of the incantations begin to seem less excessive. And maybe if she thinks of the base as a transformative hybrid rather than a clean slate--

She registers vaguely when they start setting up the chessboard, busy diagramming practice exercises in her notebook as requested while turning the theory over and over in her head trying to understand and marvelling at the way, in certain bundles, contradictory properties can both be present.

Professor Snape shakes her awake from the deepest sleep she's had in ages.

"Who won?" she mumbles.

"I told you she wasn't likely to scream," Professor McGonagall says from the kitchenette where she's busy piling tableware onto a tray.

"Minnie did, of course."

"And you only get the 'of course' because he's had half an hour to come to terms with it," Professor McGonagall tells Hermione smugly. "When _did_ you last sleep through the night?"

Hermione has no idea. She covers a yawn. "August? No, then there was the Dreamless Sleep."

Professor Snape is frowning. "And you won't get me to give you any more of that until late June, at the earliest," he says.

"Hecate's _bodkin_ ," Professor McGonagall says fervently. "At least I feel better about letting you sleep through dinner, then. Come set the table, Severus, and we'll see what we can't get the house-elves to bring us."

He turns where he is and settles more comfortably on the floor, his greasy hair catching on the edge of the cushion near her knee, and sets the table from there with a series of pretty charms that are probably listed in Hermione's copy of _A New Mother's Little Book of Housemaking_.

\---

Hermione's lying on her back with her stocking feet on her pillow, watching the flickering light from the fire push shadows across the ceiling.

Ron sits on Lavender's bed, smoothing the tassels sewn into the quilt. "Lavender's right. I can't be your only friend, Hermione."

"You're not," she says, slowly unpicking the braid she's just worked into a strand of hair by her temple.

"Yeah? Who else is there?"

"There's Harry," Hermione says.

"Harry's not himself."

"He still counts," she says, as Ron shakes his head. "Fine. And Daphne, I guess."

"See? The only people you talk to these days are me, and a bunch of people who think You-Know-Who is the best thing since floo powder. You're a muggleborn witch--"

"None of them think You-Know-Who is such a chuff." Hermione rolls over and sits up.

"It's like you have no idea what Death Eaters actually do to people like you. They'll trick you into doing their work because you're too nice, but they don't actually care about you. Not like friends would."

"Do you really think Dumbledore's all that much better?"

"Would you listen to yourself?" Ron says, drawing back.

"How has it escaped you that Professor Dumbledore is trying to keep us away from Harry? Or that his new rules for the school are dangerous?"

"Because they're necessary!" Ron's twisted to face her directly. He grips the edge of Lavender's bed aggressively.

"Veritaserum poisoning in pre-teens? You think that's necessary? Honestly, Ron, can't you see he's doing the same thing to the Slytherins as You-Know-Who is doing to muggles?"

"You're a bloodly fool, Hermione, if you think it's the same thing. Muggles never did anything to anyone; I can't say as much for the Slytherins. Next you'll be telling me how much you want me and Malfoy to be mates."

"Rowena Burroughs was hit in the middle of the sixth-floor corridor with a jinx by a pair of upper form Ravenclaws. What do you think Rowena did to them?"

"She obviously did _something_. Remember Malfoy and his goons? No one ever saw what they did to us, either."

"Listen to me," Hermione begins.

"No, you listen to me," Ron interrupts, talking over her. "When You-Know-Who wins this war, you're going to break your wand and pretend you never heard of magic, because he'll make the world so unbearable for people like you--"

"So why does the alternative have to be just as bad for someone who isn't me?"

"You learned nothing from S.P.E.W.," he complains. "This is exactly how you ended up on academic probation. You think you know everything, but you don't. You're just bloody idealist who wants to change the world, but you don't understand! It doesn't just work the way you want it to."

Hermione sputters in shock. _An idealisst who doesssn't know how wrong she iss_.

"I'm sick of being the only rational person you're ever around," Ron continues. "So make some new friends, or you're going to lose the ones--oh, sorry, the one--you've got."

He stomps out of the dormitory room and bangs the door shut behind him.

\---

Professor Snape doesn't seem to have understood what she said, so Hermione repeats herself: "I can't."

"I assure you, Miss Granger, if I thought that were true, you wouldn't be here."

"No," she says. "I fought with Ron. I need--I want--I can't, not tonight."

"I fail to see how that relates to bundling."

Hermione forces herself to look at him, though she knows he can read her vulnerability on her face. "I don't have the energy or the concentration for sustained casting tonight. I'll just mess things up."

"Find it, then," Professor Snape says. "Or pretend, but don't waste my time by showing up and backing out. Has it never occurred to you that I am also tired and short of patience and would rather be reading by my own fire?"

That stings, and of course he notices when she winces. "What would you be reading?"

"Minnie's notes on aggregate transfiguration, probably," he says, ill-tempered. "Because had you left me to my own devices tonight, it would have only been a reprieve until tomorrow. Fortunately, there's an end in sight: if you can bundle tonight's potions, you ought to be able to handle the brewer's bases for the Universal Base, at least in small quantities."

"Really?" Hermione asks, sceptical.

"I thought you'd at least sound more enthusiastic than that. But, yes, unless my calculations are off."

She offers a small smile as an olive branch and reaches for the parchment where he's listed the potions for her to bundle, their ingredients, and their properties. He's already set out beakers of each.

"Professor Snape?" Hermione asks, frowning at the list. "Wound-cleaning potion? Are you sure that can be bundled with the rest of these? Won't the leech juice react?"

"Give me that." He plucks it from her hands. He taps his fingertips lightly against the edge of the workstation countertop while he rereads, the corners of his mouth dragging down as he progresses. "You might be right. I suppose there's nothing for it; try it without first."

It works easily without the Wound-cleaning potion. She can feel it beginning to knit itself together when Professor Snape makes a strange little noise and turns away from her, clutching his arm.

"Professor?" she says, dropping the spell and letting the potions splash into the cauldron, contaminated instead of combined.

"We're both lucky there was nothing volatile--or toxic--in that mix," he bites out.

"I wouldn't have let it go if there were," Hermione says. She's always careful, ever since the polyjuice incident. She knows how to handle delicate potions.

"I'm all right," Professor Snape says, straightening. "It's nothing, but you'll have to start again."

"Can I add the Wound-cleaning potion this time?"

"I don't know why you'd want to, but if--" He breaks off, raising his head as if he's heard something.

"What?" Hermione says. "What's wrong now?"

Professor Snape turns on her. "Hogwarts protects herself. You've read that blasted history enough to know it. As a Head of House--I have to go. Fetch Minnie, quickly, if you please. Come through my rooms; there's floo powder on the mantle. Meet me in the Great Hall." His hands are warm and heavy on her shoulders. "Both of you. Don't let her bully you into staying behind."

\---

Professor Snape is waiting for them at the doors to the Great Hall. "Minnie," he says. "It's Albus."

"And Pomona's adrift? I'll see to her," she nods. "Don't fret, my boy."

Professor Snape holds the door for her, and Hermione follows them both.

Professor McGonagall flinches, which is all the warning Hermione gets before she sees it. A body is strewn the length of the high table, neatly diced into its constituent parts. When she reaches out for something to steady herself against, she closes her wand hand over Professor Snape's left arm. She can feel his Mark under her palm where she was burned, despite the various layers of robes and jacket and shirt. She lets go of him instantly as her body tries to expel its observations: unsee, unfeel, unhear.

"Don't you dare ruin my robes," Professor Snape says, but he reels her in with a light tug on her elbow so she can drop her head to his shoulder for an instant of dark wool and laundry soap. Hermione's distantly aware of someone else sobbing, but she blocks it out in favour of concentrating on Professor Snape's voice. "I'm going to tell you what I've learned, and then you will stand on your own. Understood?"

Hermione nods.

"If you're trying to retch, that's the Dark magic. You'll get used to it; try to swallow around it. Prior incantato shows the incantation for the spell was Segmentiseca. There is no counter-spell that I know of. You'll do yourself violence if you try to create one. Do you believe me?"

"Yes."

"Good. Look at me and I'll show you the rest."

"Severus!" Professor McGonagall says.

Hermione straightens, untangles her hand from the loose outer sleeve of his teaching robes, and meets his eyes. It's unflinchingly direct and too-personal, but she manages not to blink him away as she feels the first brush of another consciousness against her own. She feels him page through the past few minutes, too quickly to retrieve anything but impressions, and then beckon her onward.

She falls, with a somehow-familiar sensation, into a foreign world. It's so different from pensieve memories, where she herself stands in the scene with her own awareness and emotions. Here she is nothing, though she's everywhere. There are days she doesn't recognize the person in the mirror as herself, but here she knows herself, the bushy-haired Miss Granger who accepts the floo powder with a pinched expression that isn't particularly attractive. When she's satisfied Miss Granger is gone--and Miss Granger had better not choose now as the moment to play the schoolgirl; Minnie will want to leave her behind--she takes her own pinch of floo powder and tosses it into the flames with a "Point me," in what is still Professor Snape's voice, even if it does sound slightly odd through his own ears.

She steps out of the fire into the anteroom of the Great Hall, where the food used to be prepared before the service, before modern kitchens. She catalogues the lack of disturbances almost without noticing them, her mind still a whirlwind of Hogwarts-Minnie-Miss Granger and the little thread of hope that Draco isn't involved. The castle prompts her; she takes the cue and lets herself into the Great Hall through the little service door beside the dais, whose structure obscures a proper view of the room at first. The room reeks of Dark Magic like an ache in her bones, with a sweet glint of seduction woven through it. Hermione has never felt anything like it, though Professor Snape has, and welcomes it even as she steels herself against it. She has no mental vocabulary for what she wants, just that ache of want-need-please, and the awareness of a promised completion that she desires with everything she is. She can feel the rapid reasoning (the last time a spell this Dark was used in this school), the fear (no, she shan't acknowledge the fear), the crushing sense of heavy responsibility, the need not to be the one who discovers this, the relief when the Deputy Headmistress says, just behind her shoulder, "oh, sweet Nimue save us," then rushes heedlessly into the Hall with a cry of dismay.

She already know what she'll see if she follows the Deputy Headmistress's gaze; she looks only to confirm it and to note the inconsistencies, if there are any. She recognizes enough to know it's Albus even without Hogwarts' suggestion, and doesn't bother to deny the flash of ruthless satisfaction. There's a wand on the Hufflepuff table; she wraps her fingers in her sleeve to mute the transfer of Dark that saturates the space around the wand, and casts prior incantato with her own wand. Hermione has just enough time to observe the results, to feel the need to stop Miss Granger from barging blindly into _this_ as is her wont, the deep-welling desire to have Minnie at her back before it gets any worse, the consciousness of Pomona weeping, stupid woman--

Using her own wand feels so right. The purposefulness and ease of it is in her blood, at the end of all of her nerves, and she's aware of the world again, arcs of magic connecting her to everything. Except it isn't her wand she's using--it's Professor Snape's. She misses her own so desperately that it pushes her out of his head with a pop that makes her ears hurt.

"I want my wand back," she sighs.

"Is that what threw you out?" he says. His voice is no different than ever, but it feels too intimate. She's sure he's smiling, though he doesn't look like it. "I was certain it would be the _other_ wand."

"The other--" The memory is hers now, of his experience. She, Hermione, recognizes the wand on the Hufflepuff table instantly. Professor Snape clearly hadn't, at least not at first, but Hermione sees that wand every day, has held it and cast with it-- "Harry. Oh, no, he's going to--I'll go find him."

"Harry Potter?" she hears Professor McGonagall say to Professor Snape. "Merlin's teeth, Severus. And she's--I shall never question your methods again, except on special occasions."

\---

Of course Harry is in the Room of Requirement; unlike Ron, who's always looking for private corners, Harry's never had to find other places to hide. The door opens onto the edge of the village square in Godric's Hollow. When Hermione shuts it behind her, it becomes the unremarkable front door of the pub on the square, complete with a sign in the window flipped to "closed." The muggle illumination flickers. One of the lampposts is broken; the shattered glass at the foot of the post glints from the pavement. The next lamppost fades gently from yellow to orange to yellow again, as though the bulb is nearly burnt out.

She's only been here once before, but she's still drawn to the Potter memorial obelisk with something that is more curiosity than familiarity. It becomes the statue of the Potter family as she approaches, much as she remembers it except for the black singed trace of a hex slashing across Lily Potter and the baby in her arms.

Harry is in the graveyard, his arms crossed, in front of his parents' tombstone. Hermione sees him first from the back, a long-limbed shadow holding a wand that appears to grow from his ribs at an awkward angle. She steps on a loose flagstone that shifts with a clink; Harry whirls to face her, arm extended and wand pointed at her in perfect duelist's form that is as terrifying as it is impressive. "Stop right there or I'll--" he says in a voice she's never heard from Harry. She stumbles back a step, rocking the loose flagstone again. "--Hermione?"

"It's me," Hermione says.

"How did Ron get his scar?"

"In the--oh, that one. Fred bit him when he was two. It's _me_ , Harry."

The wand pointed at her heart wavers. It doesn't flex like a wand; it isn't a wand at all, but a twig of about the right length, a little too thin and not quite straight. Harry drops his arm, tossing the stick aside. "Why'd you follow me?"

"You shouldn't have to be alone."

"I should have died," Harry says, "that's what I should have done. Only my parents were too thick-headed to realise it." In the half-light, his face is a pale mask of fury.

"I should have been with you," Hermione says grimly. "You shouldn't have had to be there alone."

Harry chokes in disagreement. "I turned on _Dumbledore_."

"No," Hermione says, stepping off the flagstone footpath to join him in front of the gravestone. "I won't believe that's what happened."

"What if it is, though?"

"You'll never be my enemy."

"Don't you get it? I don't _want_ you," Harry says. "This will get worse and worse until, one day, I won't get to choose."

"It will get better," she says, desperately. "I promise you, it will. I'll do whatever--"

"You're as wrong as my stupid, selfish mum." Harry tips his chin at the gravestone. "Sirius told me she chose that quote, 'The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.' Like she already knew what she was going to do to me."

"Well, I won't," Hermione insists, reaching for his hand. "You decide, but I won't let you do it alone."

She isn't wrong; after a moment, Harry's fingers curl around her palm.

"Did they find my wand?"

"Yes," Hermione says.

"I guess we should go back."

\---

"It wasn't me." Harry clings to Hermione's shoulders, one long arm wrapped around her and pressed against her sternum. The ragged thumbnail of his other hand digs into the skin just above her crushed collar at the back of her neck. Professor McGonagall adjusts her glasses again and gives Professor Sprout another worried glance.

"I fought him as long as I could--you have to believe me. It wasn't me, but I couldn't fight them both," Harry insists.

"And then you dropped your wand and fled like a coward," Professor Snape says, halting his pacing along the invisible line separating Harry and Hermione from the professors, "presumably to wherever you were when Miss Granger found you. Typical."

"You don't know what it was like, how long I held out--"

"Between the hex and the dark spell? A mere handful of seconds. Don't look at Professor McGonagall; I am the one you answer to right now. Talk."

"He asked me to take a walk with him," Harry says. "Professor Dumbledore. He said he wanted to talk about my internship, as an Auror."

"This is the first I've heard of this," Kingsley says. Professor McGonagall silences him with a frown.

"And then he pulled his wand on me in the Great Hall." Harry's collar is slashed; Hermione can't see it but she knows it's visible: the hex-scorched skin on his neck around the gash that Hermione has already healed, a slicing hex that missed the mark. "And then the other was there, he, like he knew when I got hurt."

" _I_ knew," Professor Snape says. "Of course _he_ did."

Professor McGonagall narrows her eyes at Harry. Hermione braces herself. "Do you have a Dark Mark, Harry?"

Professor Flitwick tries to signal Hermione to move away, as if it's not the murder but the Dark Mark that makes Harry dangerous. Hermione isn't going to leave Harry alone in front of anyone. She twists to get her hand over his and squeezes.

Professor Sprout recoils at Harry's miserable nod. Professor Flitwick stops gesturing at Hermione and climbs onto a chair so that Professor Sprout can lean on his shoulder.

"You need to stop trying to shield Harry, Hermione," Professor McGonagall says. "Whether it was impelled, justified, or pure madness, you can't face what happened on his behalf."

"No," Hermione says. "Harry, don't let go."

"Well," says Professor McGonagall. "I don't suppose there's anything to be gained in arguing over it. Hermione stays with Harry. Filius? How are your wards? Still tip-top? I want the room we used for Remus set up for Harry, who will not have his wand returned, since he is clearly a danger to others. Kingsley, you have a problem with my instructions?"

"I have my reservations about reinstating your position at the head of this school," Kingsley says, "especially given the fact that your first--ahem--edict is to leave a student in the immediate vicinity of a clear and present danger."

"Because I was school friends with a boy who grew up to be a terror? Don't be ridiculous. You followed Lucius Malfoy about for years, if I recall. Let's take stock of our options--Albus is dead, Severus is a Death Eater, Filius is the school's brightest professor but its worst leader, poor Pomona's had a shock and is already reeling under the duties of Deputy Headmistress, and Hermione--who held her own with You-Know-Who--is still a student. You're a stranger to this school. My colleagues know me, and will protest in public or in private if they disapprove.

"Harry Potter, you are hereby suspended from attending classes until further notice."

"Yes, Professor."

"Kingsley, not a word to the Magical Law Enforcement or the Ministry until we sort this out. Once they establish that Imperius wasn't cast, they'll throw him to the wolves without any attempt to understand whether or not Harry Potter has become a tool of the Dark Lord. Pomona, if you think it's wiser, we'll set you up as Headmistress but I think you'd better stay as you are."

"I do think that's best, Minerva." Professor Sprout sags with relief.

"Severus? Diffusion and disorder; if you can play up my supposed affiliation to Tom to the relevant people? It'll be a scandal either way, but at least this way we can play it as--" She makes a vague gesture over her right shoulder.

"Yes," Professor Snape says. "Outside corruption. Shall I contact the governors or will you?"

"Split it; and I'll make the official announcement. Pomona? Will you fetch me the Head Boy and Girl and give me a hand later to notify the parents? And Hermione--you can help Professor Flitwick by keeping an eye on Harry while he works."

\---

"I have three things to say," Professor McGonagall announces, "before I let you get on with your breakfast. Professor Dumbledore will be missed. Your professors are here if you need help or wish to speak to someone in your grief; your parents and guardians have already been notified. Secondly, there will be no further Ministry presence within this school, including Professor Dumbledore's letterbox and the absurd disciplinary examination committee. Finally, harassment or bullying of any student, for any reason, will be sanctioned with detention and loss of house points. Any student practicing Dark Arts will be expelled--I want to see clean arms and cooperation. Behave." She smooths her robes and sits back down without waiting for applause.

"At least that was short," Ron says as he slaps his copy of the _Daily Prophet_ onto Hermione's plate from across the table. "Hogwarts Headmaster and Minister for Magic Albus P. W. B. Dumbledore Murdered at Age 116" stares up at her. The entire front page is covered with related articles, from "Unidentified Culprit Still At Large" to "Corrupt Board of Governors Name Minerva McGonagall Headmistress" and "Rufus Scimgeour Reinstated As Interim Minister" and even "McGonagall Name Dropped in Anti-Muggle Terrorism Trial".

"Thanks, Ron," Hermione says.

"Where's Harry?" Ron grumbles.

"Sick," Hermione lies, pushing the paper aside and tucking into her egg.

"Listen, I'm sorry for the things I said yesterday."

"It's fine." Yesterday seems like months ago.

"But I mean, McGonagall--"

"Professor McGonagall."

"Right. Anyway, even the papers think that creeps like Lucius Malfoy and Rabastan Lestrange are behind that. And Dumbledore, who was our best chance, is dead. He's dead. You could be next. You should be scared, Hermione."

"I am," she says. "Maybe for different reasons."

"You don't act like it."

Hermione shrugs. "Other things keep getting in the way, Ron."

"It's not all about you," Lavender says unexpectedly.

"I know that," Hermione says shortly.

"I was talking to both of you. Pass me the butter." Hermione does. Lavender spreads it so thinly and precisely over her toast that Hermione suspects she's charmed her knife. "Listening to you argue is misaligning my aura. Just stop already. Who's closest to the jam?"

Ron sets it in front of her. "There you go, Lav. I think there's mulberry, further down the table. Want me to check?"

"It's black current," Hermione says, stretching over Dean and a sixth year student to snag it.

"Thanks," says Ron, holding his hand out for the jar.

\---

Wand work in potions class is the first thing that's been difficult all year. Hermione feels like she's fighting her wand, and, when she manages to get it to cooperate, it's as though the wand movements go against the current of magic in the potion. On Thursday she stares in horror at her cauldron as it melts all over the workstation, cleans the mess she knows is non-toxic with a quiet, shameful evanesco, and flees the classroom before anyone can comment. It's the first time in seven years that she's failed to complete a potion, her first class for which she receives no credit. It's too humiliating to stand.

"What happened to your Gryffindor bravado?" Professor Snape says when she shows up that evening to work on the Universal Base, for fear he might actually make things worse if she appears to be avoiding him. "You should have stayed."

"I couldn't have taken more humiliation," she snaps.

"Kindly watch your tone; it isn't my fault you're now a more efficient brewer than your classmates and simply managed to melt your cauldron _first_."

It rather is, but Hermione doesn't point that out. "Who else did?"

He pins her with a steady stare from across half the classroom, where she's setting out the brewer's bases to bundle into the Universal Base. "If you were that interested, you'd have stayed to find out. Minnie has ten galleons riding on your not being able to manage it before your fourth class; I don't want to forfeit to her because you refuse to try again. I expect you in class tomorrow, and again on Monday, no matter what tomorrow's melt looks like."

"You wager on me?"

Professor Snape frowns at her. "I know you well enough by now, I think, to be able--and entitled--to obtain some form of compensation for putting up with your constant inquisitions."

"I'm the one doing the work, though. If I win you ten galleons, shouldn't some of that be mine?"

"I'll buy you a--a book, since I can't buy you a drink," he says shortly. "Satisfied? I don't have time to coddle you today: I have essays to mark and fire retardants and Burn-healing paste to prepare for tomorrow's fourth years, who inevitably explode a cauldron when using salamander blood. You'll start with five millilitres of each base."

It's obvious, almost as soon as Hermione begins, that the bases were meant to be bundled together, unlike the last several of Professor Snape's exercises. The neat procedure is anti-climatic; although she still has to add the blue knotgrass and heat it to boiling to fix the bundle, it feels too easy. She bundles ten millilitres more, and sets the Universal Base aside for testing before she does the rest.

Her hands are sweaty and shaking afterwards, a result of the massive amounts of focused energy required. She wipes them on her robes and clenches them to hold them still. Her workstation is cleaned and her supplies put away. She hefts her bag, unsure of her welcome. "You said--do you really mean that about needing compensation for, uh--?"

"Are you offereing?" Professor Snape asks distractedly with a glance at the bag hanging from her shoulder. "I suppose you could finish the Burn-healing paste. The dittany's fresh, since it won't have to keep; don't ruin the batch by turning the flame up any more that I've already done."

"Oh," Hermione says. There's almost thirty minutes of work left to finish the Burn-healing paste. "Oh! Yes; no, I'll keep it low."

\---

Hermione talks Ron out of going to the memorial ceremony they're having for Professor Dumbledore. Professor Flitwick has charmed the parts back together--Dean says he saw him and it doesn't look half-bad--so that they can leave the casket open for the reporters and the generations of former students. Classes are cancelled for the day and the castle is in chaos with the lack of usual structure and the influx of visitors.

"I still can't believe he's dead," Ron says. "He's Professor Dumbledore."

"Then don't go," Hermione repeats. "Because realising that while Rita Skeeter has a Dictoquill in her hand could only be worse if somebody has a camera. Which someone will."

"I wanted to see the mural," says Ron.

Hermione rolls her eyes. "The mural will still be there tomorrow."

"I bet we're missing a great buffet."

"Ron," says Hermione, tired of pandering to him. "I have to tell you something."

"Is this about the homework I didn't turn in?"

Hermione casts a Privacy Charm and settles on Harry's unused bed. "It's about You-Know-Who. I recognized him at King's Cross, and he--I--I mean, that's where I was."

"I know that," Ron says. "You disappeared for the weekend. I'm not stupid; I can guess what happened. I don't understand why you wouldn't tell me."

"Harry said--I guess it doesn't matter. I don't know." Hermione flops back onto the pillow, hiding her face behind her hands. "And there's all this other stuff, but none of it's mine to tell."

"Yeah?"

"He said--I know he was trying to manipulate me, but that doesn't make it less true--that the only way for Harry to survive is for him to win."

Ron doesn't say anything for a long time. "Maybe," Ron says. "But it depends on whose move it is, like zugzwang. You know, in chess."

"Did you know Professor McGonagall plays?"

"Who cares?" Ron says, tossing a pillow at her. The corner is cold and wet from where he's been chewing on it. "Ever done something you'd give anything to undo? I mean, anything."

"No," Hermione says.

"I hate you sometimes," Ron says. He might be joking. "But I wish I'd never said any of that stuff to you. Or I wish you'd do something to hurt me back so we'd be even."

"It doesn't work that way," Hermione tells the ceiling.

"It should," Ron says. "You started it, but I'm the one who feels guilty."

"I miss Harry," says Hermione.

"You miss Harry, _too_ ," Ron corrects her. He sighs. "Throw me my pillow back?"

\---

"We have something to show you," Lavender says. Fay hovers behind her, tucking her hair behind her ears. "You have to come back to the dorm with us. And you have to promise not to say anything about divination not being a science."

"Can't this wait?" Hermione asks. She's in the middle of the Ss (Scintillation Solution, Screaming Snakes Hair Potion, Shrinking Solution, Skele-Gro, Sleeping Draught, Snuffling Potion), recopying the list of potions that can be made from the Universal Base, certain she's forgotten some since she memorised them in August. They're listed by brewer's base; if she stops now, she'll throw off the alphabetization charm and have to start again from the top of the alphabet.

Lavender looks back at Fay, who shakes her head. "No," says Lavender.

"All right," Hermione agrees, "but this had better be worth it."

The full complement of Lavender's divination material is scattered in a chalked pentacle inscribed within a circle in the center of the room. They've pushed all four beds out of the way to make enough room for the circle. Fay has been scrying in the face-cream pot filled with water again; whatever she's seen has left the floor wet.

"Fay found a prophecy about You-Know-Who's demise," Lavender explains, "being given to Professor Dumbledore, so we thought it might be important, especially given the fact he's dead now and that the alignment of the planets tonight--"

"Okay," Hermione says. "Yes, the planets; what's the point?"

"We know who killed Professor Dumbledore."

"Okay?" says Hermione cautiously.

Lavender pouts. "Well, if you already knew you could at least have warned us."

"Come on, Lavender. The Ministry can't even figure that out."

"It was You-Know-Who," Lavender says. "We're all in danger. And it's obvious. I even tried with the tarot deck, twice, and I'm getting the same reading. Look--" She drags Hermione forward, pointing at the cards on the floor: the Chariot Hermione recognises, and Fortitude, and a Page, a fourth card she can't quite see underneath the stand for a crystal ball, and the upside-down three of Coins. "That isn't Harry."

The cards mean nothing to Hermione.

"Hermione!" Lavender scolds. "There is no way that can be Harry. Every time I do a spread for him, Fortitude's reversed, and look--that reversed three of Pentacles--"

"I thought they were Coins?"

"Same thing," Lavender says with a wave of her hand. Behind her, Fay nods. "Either way; it's an earth card. Harry? Reversed? No way. That's Neville.--You don't think I'm making this up? This is where Ron refused to listen."

"Er, no," Hermione says. "I'm still trying to figure it out--the cards mean that what's Neville?"

"The one in the prophecy," Lavender says impatiently. "Did I skip that? There's a prophecy about the only way to kill You-Know-Who."

"Either must die by the other's hand, neither can survive while the other lives," Fay says. "I think."

"I know," Hermione says, looking at the splatter of water over the chalk circle with begrudging interest.

"Harry's not the Chosen One. Neville is--was. That means that You-Know-Who had to kill Neville, or he wouldn't be able to survive, like the prophecy says."

"And if he killed Neville..." Fay says.

"Then You-Know-Who also killed Professor Dumbledore," Lavender says. "I'm certain of it. It's not just that both of them were chopped up--see? We did our research, too. We spent all afternoon on this."

"Honestly," Hermione says, jealous. When Hermione's methodology is wrong, her conclusions are wrong, too--but Lavender's actually make sense. "That is the worst application of logic, ever."

"It's not logic," Fay says. "It's divination."

"Then you should tell Professor McGonagall," Hermione says, "not me and Ron."

"But," Lavender says weakly, "Professor McGonagall is in love with You-Know-Who."

"Did you read that in her tea leaves?" Hermione asks.

"Of course not. Why waste time on facts," Lavender says, "when You-Know-Who is killing people in the school?"

"How is that worse than killing people outside the school?"

Lavender squints at Hermione as though she's said something preposterous, but then shakes her head. "You're right. We're asking the wrong questions. The prophecy said Neville had the power to vanquish You-Know-Who. We need to learn what that was. Fay? Can we scry for that, or is the question too, you know?"

"Maybe," says Fay, thoughtfully. "It depends on the phase the moon was in when the prophecy was given, and I'm not sure... We could try the bone dice first."

"Enough about the prophecy," says Hermione. "Professor Trelawney gives one every week, sometimes more. And how many have come true?"

"One," says Lavender. "So far. But none of them are temporally bound. You promised you wouldn't say anything bad about divination."

"I'm going to go finish my list," Hermione says diplomatically.

\---

Daphne jabs her in the ribs with a wand in the corridor on the way to History of Magic and Hermione doesn't get past opening her mouth to protest--hexing in the corridors is against school rules. She knows that wand. Daphne switches the wand around to offer Hermione the grip.

"How did you get my wand back?" Hermione asks, ready to weep with the comfort of the right wand against her palm. She throws her arms around Daphne, who stands rigidly until Hermione lets her go.

"Someone thought you'd be a less recalcitrant protégée if your patroness gave you what you want most. Professor Snape's idea, probably, unless it was You-Know-Who himself, but I accept fawning gratitude. And this--" Daphne shifts the books cradled in her left arm to free a thin cloth-bound book. "--is from Professor Snape."

The book creaks when Hermione opens it, so new that the binding is stiff. There's no bookplate or inscription.

"Show me," Daphne demands. "Jos. Berne & Children, Publishers - Mosley Pike, Coketown - Since 1564. They're a monograph publisher. My dad's great-aunt worked there. I was hoping for poetry."

"It was a bet," Hermione says. "Why would it be poetry?"

"No, you're right. It's a cheap copy, too," Daphne says. "Cloth? Berne & Children use cardboard and cloth on their penny editions because it's cheaper than horn or leather covers; everyone knows that."

"My wand is heaps better than some cheap book," Hermione says, which makes Daphne's mouth quirk up a little.

Hermione skips lunch to read, floating the book in front of her and turning the pages with her wand just to feel the crisp ease of magic at her fingertips. The book is _Dissolution and Unbinding_ , a reprinting of a tract published in 1737 by an anonymous proponent for divorce. Its main argument is to refute the claim that damage to individuals in trothed marriages who wished to separate is unavoidable, which it does by proposing "seven principles of separation", seven theoretically magically-feasible methods of dissociating unions, some of which are less preposterous than others. The book includes later annotations on facing pages concerning the magical structure of divorce as it was eventually implemented. It's archaic and absurd and almost boring.

Having her wand back is so much better. She can't get enough of proper magic channeled perfectly through her wand. Professor Binns notices, for once, and asks her to stop fidgeting. She corners Ginny after class and makes her teach her the wretched laundry spells. Then she charms the grass stains out of all of Ron's quidditch uniforms and pads. _Protect Harry Potter_ , the wand whispers to her, _keep him alive for me_. Hermione doesn't listen; she stays up reading by wandlight after an evening full of stardust and glitter and real, pure magic.

The next day, in potions class, wand work is effortless and satisfying. Professor Snape, not quite smiling to himself, drops her mark for the day by a few points, "for showing off," he says. Hermione doesn't care; holding her own wand would even be worth a failing grade.

\---

Hermione's settled on Professor McGonagall's couch with her shoes off and her feet up on the middle cushion, trying to finish re-memorizing the list of potions. (Rat tonic, Regeneration potion, Regerminating Potion, Rejuicing Potion, Replenishing Potion, Restorative Draught, Revive Potion...) Ancient Runes is cancelled because Professor Babbling has a bad case of the Vanishing Sickness that is going around, and the second year Charms class is in the library.

Hermione looks up in surprise when the door bangs open, but it's only Professor Snape, wearing a cloak meant for colder weather and looking grimmer than usual. "Where's Minnie?"

"Professor McGonagall took a floo call in the Headmistress's office," Hermione says.

Professor Snape rubs a hand over his eyes, grimaces, then shuts the door behind him. He works the clasp of his cloak without a mirror and with one hand, and sets the cloak gently over the back of one of the chairs.

"I thought there was a sixth year Gryffindor-Ravenclaw Potions class now," Hermione says absently as he sits down, his feet perfectly aligned in front of the chair. Ginny's in that Potions class. It's one thing to cancel the N.E.W.T.-level Ancient Runes class for the day--there are only three students--and quite another to cancel Potions.

"Vector's covering. Has she been gone long?" He's pale with lack of sleep, but his face is hard and sharp, full of lines and shadows.

"More than five minutes," Hermione says. "You--sorry, Professor." If he were Ron, she'd ask if he were all right.

"I--?" Professor Snape asks, focusing on her as though there were nothing else in the room.

"You look like something awful's happened."

"No more so than usual," he says, folding his hands into his sleeves so only his long, stained fingers show.

There's nothing to reply to that, so they sit in silence until Professor McGonagall returns through the floo with a whoosh, her expression as grim as Professor Snape's.

"Good," she says to Professor Snape when she sees him in her sitting room. "I hoped you might have come straight here. I wasn't eager to send Hermione to find you."

"Miss Granger said you were on a call. London?"

"What happened in London?" Hermione asks.

Professor McGonagall sinks onto the couch next to Hermione, stiff-backed. Hermione pulls her own legs under her and sits up a little straighter.

"My parents are in London," Hermione says, worried.

"Your parents are safe, as far as I know. There were two injuries this morning as muggle police arrested eight people with firebombs and another with an explosive device this morning during the commuter rush," Professor McGonagall explains, "including two wizards and one witch." She pins Professor Snape with a very pointed look. "Were you seen?"

Professor Snape blinks. "Not after judicious use of Memory Charms."

"You're a Death Eater," Hermione says.

"Did you forget?" Professor Snape asks.

"And you were trying to kill a bunch of muggles?" Hermione says, trying to work her head around it while her heart hammers and everything instinctual urges her to recoil.

"I wasn't _trying_ to do anything. My job was entirely successful, until someone's Imperius slipped and the muggle puppet threw himself on a patrol officer. Minnie, I wanted to get back before the Ministry got involved."

"But--" says Hermione.

"It's virtually impossible to do anything now before the Ministry gets involved," Professor McGonagall says. "That much can be said for Albus's meddling."

Professor Snape nods. "Unfortunate. But what, Miss Granger? I am a member of an organization that requires me to follow orders. And I do. Those orders are never 'kill muggles'."

"But you know that's not true," Hermione protests. Professor McGonagall cleans her glasses with a conjured handkerchief that fades into thin air as soon as she's finished. "How can you pretend you don't understand what it leads to?"

"I suppose you have an alternative to propose?" Professor Snape asks calmly. "Do you have any idea why there are no reformed Death Eaters?"

"Those could have been my parents--or me--"

"--or my father, were he still alive," Professor Snape says. "And now you have successfully diverted the conversation. This isn't, in fact, about you, Miss Granger. The conversation we ought to be having is about escalation."

"I was going to say," Professor McGonagall says. "Large-scale terrorism seems excessive, even for You-Know-Who."

"That's why I needed to be there. If I ever find out which of those bumbling incompetents can't hold an Imperius, I will hex him so hard he can never cast another; the whole thing was a wash and I haven't learned anything that we didn't know before."

"All I have from the Ministry is very second- and third-hand. A certain Greeves--a muggle expert--is supposed to have estimated the probable planned damage in millions of pounds and in the area of a hundred lives. If he's right--Severus, this is unacceptable."

"Who are they blaming?"

"A republican faction no-one's heard of--despite the truce, or because of it. That bloody referendum!"

"I thought the referendum was a good thing," Hermione says. "My dad said that Dickie Grieve--oh, Professor, is that who you meant? He's not just an expert. He's head of the British anti-terrorism task force." He and Hermione's dad were school friends; Hermione's never met him.

"Why wouldn't the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland be a good thing?" Professor Snape asks. "Regardless of its overall value, there are always dissenters. My lord and master wouldn't have had the excuse to try to pull this off without it."

"Someone needs to stop him," Hermione says. "Why doesn't the Ministry do anything?"

"That's exactly my point," Professor McGonagall says. "Without Albus kicking them into a frenzy, the Ministry won't budge. I can't tell whether the they can't see who's behind this or whether they think it'll go away if they don't acknowledge it."

"It can't be just us." Hermione bends over for her shoes and jerks them on, right foot, then left foot. She ties the laces with vicious tugs. "We have to do something. I'm going to go to the libr--"

Both of her professors are staring at her--Professor Snape is frowning, but Professor McGonagall looks like she's trying not to laugh.

"You have Arithmancy in ten minutes," Professor McGonagall says after a moment. "Septima tried to dodge by reminding me she had you second hour when I asked her to cover Severus's class."

\---

Hermione's half-asleep on her own bed before dinner, listening to Ron and Lavender pretend to disagree about the refereeing of last night's quidditch match. She must actually fall asleep, because the next thing she hears Lavender say is, "My dad says they agreed to put off the trial until after exams."

"I don't see why there has to be a trial," Ron says. "If you can tell he didn't do it even with divination..."

"It's not about whether Harry murdered anyone," Hermione says without opening her eyes. "He's famous, and that'll make everyone sit up and listen when his defence keeps demonstrating how You-Know-Who did it."

"I don't like it. It's too risky," Ron says. "Even strategically. The Ministry has final say in criminal trials. Harry could end up in Azkaban because it's easier than trying to catch You-Know-Who."

"Harry agreed," Hermione points out. "Because it'll raise public awareness against Voldemort without creating a new scapegoat, no matter what the outcome of the trial is. And he won't go to Azkaban; people like Harry. Anyway, Professor McGonagall made them put that in the terms of the agreement to a public trial."

"Couldn't someone just exorcise him?" Lavender says. There's a shuffle on Lavender's bed; the mattress complains and the blankets whisper as they shift. "Would you open the window, Ron? Pretty please?"

"It'll cost you," Ron says, followed shortly by a noisy kiss. "Paid in full," he says. The mattress creaks when he stands. His footsteps are familiar on the dorm floor. The window squeaks. It's windy and nearly warm out; the gusts of air drag in shouts from the quidditch pitch.

"Can you please put a Paperweight Charm or a book on my homework?" Hermione asks. "I think Harry's imbued, not inhabited." She sighs over the wind. "It's Dark, so who knows."

"And we are not exorcising Harry," Ron says. "Do you know what that does to people who aren't hosting a spirit?"

"Of course I do," Lavender huffs. She casts the paperweight charm for Hermione. "I wasn't serious, not really. She asked _you_ for the Paperweight Charm, Ron. Now I've done you a favour; do _I_ get a kiss? Do you think they're going to want me to testify?"

"Probably not," says Ron. There's another smacking kiss. "They have forensic divination experts for that, Lav."

"Lavender." Hermione opens her eyes to find the room full of spring sunshine. "You said we were asking the wrong questions," she says slowly.

"I did? Oh--about Neville's special power?"

"What if instead of trying to keep You-Know-Who away from Harry, we need figure out how to keep Harry from You-Know-Who? What if it's not a commutative spell?"

"Yes," says Ron. "You could look that up in the library. We won't mind."

Hermione sits up and repairs her ponytail, tugging the elastic out, smoothing her hair back with the flats of her hands and then twisting the elastic back into place.

"You can't go down like that," Lavender says. "Hermione--seriously, your hair. Please?"

\---

"Hi, Harry," Hermione says, settling in her usual place on the floor in front of Harry's cell. Harry's slouched against the wall, his long legs sprawled across the hospital bed set up in the cell, which has been decorated by Ron, Ginny, and Lavender with painting charms and hung with bedsheets Hermione transfigured into tapestries. The doors are open, but Hermione knows if she reaches out to touch the boundary, Professor Flitwick's wards will shimmer into visibility.

Harry is pale, with dark circles under his eyes that are magnified by his glasses, wrapped in red and gold blankets and shivering, despite the Warming charms Madam Pomfrey keeps renewed on the cell. Hermione has begun to count days like this as good days. He's always sick now; any day when he doesn't look worse is a good day.

"Professor Sprout is still stuttering in class," Hermione tells him. "I wish Professor McGonagall would do something. I feel sorry for her. Anyway--I brought you today's notes."

"I don't care," Harry mumbles. "It's too late in the year; it doesn't matter now."

"School is important, Harry," Hermione reminds him. "Do your homework; you can still graduate. You never know what you'll need to know later."

Harry laughs. "You haven't changed a bit, have you, sweetheart?"

Hermione blinks, but it's still Harry, slouching in the same position as before. "Tom?" she says.

"Clever girl," says Harry. "I knew I liked you."

"What are you doing here?" Hermione protests. "Harry is sick!"

"And getting sicker. He won't get any better while he's still fighting me. You could tell him; he won't listen to me. How have you been?"

Hermione crosses her arms and glares. "Don't waste my time."

"It's an honest question. Are _you_ keeping up with your schoolwork, Hermione Greengrass?"

"Granger," Hermione snaps.

"Graham, Granger, Greengrass; it's just a name." Harry's face smiles at her. Sweat shines at his temples. "I hear from your professor that you've become a 'tolerable' brewer. I have something for you to brew--I would have preferred to ask nothing of you so soon, but it can't be helped. Do you have a quill? Write this down."

"Why would I do anything for you?" Hermione asks.

"It's not for me. It's for your Harry. This will help the sickness, but he's in my thoughts as much as I'm in his; he'll never take it from Snape. He's rightfully paranoid. You'll have to brew it yourself. Are you ready for the recipe?"

"Yes," says Hermione, between gritted teeth.

Voldemort dictates steadily, speaking clearly in Harry's voice. Hermione has to scramble to keep up, shortening words into abbreviations that she hardly ever uses, her handwriting disintegrating into scrawl. It's a Dark potion; even writing it down twists her stomach into knots. Her palm itches, as though it hadn't healed weeks ago, and she wants to brew, with a steady burning desire that Hermione has never felt for potions before.

"Do what I tell you if you don't want to always wonder which of us you're talking to," Voldemort says, dabbing the edge of a finger under Harry's nose, where a drop of blood appears. "Get it done as soon as possible if you want to be sure he survives."

Harry slides to the left against the wall in slow motion, until he hits the bed and lies there, his eyes half-shut and chapped lips half-open, the trickle of blood edging just as slowly over his skin.

"Harry!" Hermione throws herself at the wards, but they hold. She pushes at them, though their energy hurts, stinging in a thousand points of pain across the Dark-burnt palm of her dominant hand. Jagged veins of black radiate outward from the contact along the now-visible film of the wards as it reacts to the Dark in her touch. "Harry! Madam Pomfrey! Harry!"

\---

Something bothers her about Voldemort's potion, and it isn't the part where it's Dark. That part's enticing, a feverish provocation, and if she were a little less stubborn, Hermione knows she would have started brewing it already. Ron refuses to even think about it--"You can't brew Dark potions, Hermione!" He tears the parchment up in front of her and burns the scraps in the air with a charm she'll look up later. She stuffs down the irrational rage that grows from the pit of her stomach; she's already memorised the instructions, and it only takes a few minutes to copy down a clearer version into her notebook.

That's what it takes for her to make the connection. The list of ingredients flips a toggle in her memory. She fumbles through her bookshelf for _Dissolution and Unbinding_ as soon as she finishes the last word of the recipe, smearing the ink in her haste. It's the sixth "principle" that interests her--a potion to weaken a soulbond, reverse engineered from potions that create them. The ingredients are nearly the same; the instructions are almost an inversion. Voldemort has given her the recipe for a potion that melds souls.

Ron tries to reason with her when she barrels through the Gryffindor common room, her finger still marking the page in _Dissolution and Unbinding_ , but Hermione won't be stalled. Ron and Lavender--Ron hasn't let go of her hand--trail Hermione down to the Potions classroom with Ron protesting the entire way. "You have to stop her. She wants to brew, uh--" Ron tells Professor Snape before Hermione can get a word out.

Professor Snape's gaze goes directly to her ink-smudged right hand. "Something Dark?" he supplies.

"Yes, and--wait, how do you know that?"

He raises an eyebrow at Ron. "I can tell."

"You-Know-Who," Hermione says, finally edging a word in. "He told me to brew this for Harry, but there's moonstone _and_ ashwinder eggs in it."

"I'm aware," Professor Snape says curtly. "Voldemort has other things to do than poke about for potions."

"Ugh," says Hermione. "How could you--nevermind." It's the Dark that lets her accept that Professor Snape is working to keep Harry down, but she can't bring herself to care around the sudden clarity of purpose. " _Dissolution and Unbinding_ proposed an antidote to soulbound marriages, and the commentary about why it wasn't used in wizarding divorce corrected it. Why do I want to brew this so badly? What did you change?"

"What do you mean, what did he change?" Ron asks, confused.

"That's what I changed," Professor Snape says, ignoring Ron. "Soulbinding is unethical by today's standards, not naturally Dark."

"I know that. If you tell me what you changed, I can fix the antidote to work for You-Know-Who's potion, too," Hermione insists. "I know how to compose spells--I could brew it."

"Merlin," Lavender says breathlessly, talking over Hermione's last words. "It's the Dark. Neville clashed with it, like animal print on dress robes, didn't he? That's why he couldn't do anything right in this classroom, why his magic came in so late--I'm right, aren't I? I keep trying to figure him out, and all I get is that blasted reversed three of Pentacles, the null."

"Miss Brown, I haven't the slightest idea, nor do I care what Mr Longbottom was. And, Miss Granger, the antidote as it is already takes three months to brew--nearly four, as you would have had to start last night if you don't want to wait for the next full moon. You'll have a window of only a few days to apply it. The Dark Lord won't wait that long, and Potter can't."

Hermione shakes her head. "It's a variant of the Second Antidote to Uncommon Poisons; that's a Universal Base potion. If you help me, I'll only need--well, less than three months."

"I know Hannah Abbott has a lock of Neville's hair."

"I don't care, Lavender. Harry's going to get better," Hermione says. "If he's sick because he's fighting You-Know-Who's soul, I don't want Neville's hair, even if he was allergic to Dark magic. This potion has to work."

"You can't be bloody serious, Hermione," Ron says, punctuating his words by pointing at her with his free hand. "You can't permanently bond Harry's soul to You-Know-Who's. You only want to brew this because it's Dark. That's what Dark magic does, you know: it lures, and then it corrupts."

"No," Hermione says, sure of herself. "No, I can. I'm going to brew them both. Bind them and unbind them, and buy time while I find I way to cast him out. Have you seen Harry recently, Ron? He's going to _die_ if I don't."

"You have no time to test an antidote, Miss Granger," Professor Snape says. "I thought you'd outgrown Gryffindor hysterics; will you defile your own soul for the unlikely possibility that you won't fail?"

_Why sssully yoursself?_

"I won't fail. I'm not going to let Harry fight him alone," Hermione says. "Not this time."

\---

Hermione has never skipped class intentionally before. It's happened when they've sneaked out and meant to be back before class started, and once when she looked up from a book in the library and realised she'd missed all of Charms and half of History. She's never, though, thought to herself, I have Transfiguration in twenty minutes, but I'm not going to go--at least not until today.

Since she started brewing Voldemort's potion, she drops into bed exhausted after hours and only wakes with the gray-blue of the sunrise. A whispered lumos is enough to be able to see the face of Lavender's alarm clock; both of its hands are steady on "sleeping" and "time to get up" is still far off. Hermione's own watch is a bit more direct; most mornings it reads shortly before half five. The worries and fears that used to wake her screaming seem vague and relatively childish now, at the edge of dawn. She's afraid enough, now, of horrors she knows are real. She rarely gets back to sleep, but she's still sleeping more than she has all year. It gives her a certain, clear-headed, crystalline view of the world. It's easier to think, and issues that would have had her picking her fingernails to the pink--like missing class--are no more than questions of balancing priorities. She doesn't feel guilty; finding a way to keep Harry away from Voldemort is more important than Transfiguration class. It doesn't matter whether Professor McGonagall understands. With the extra, hurried hours of brewing, she hasn't had enough time to review for the N.E.W.T.s, much less spend the time she needs researching an answer that doesn't want to be found.

The antidote to Voldemort's potion is also Dark. Hermione's had Professor Snape's begrudging help in pinpointing the changes that need to be made to the one described in _Dissolution and Unbinding_. He's walked her through the Dark magic from the first malicious counter-clockwise stir in Voldemort's potion, two long fingers against the back of her hand and his low, quiet voice dripping with satisfaction: "Now." He sits the same way she does on the classroom stools with one foot tucked over the bar and braced against the stool's leg. It takes hours spread over several days to go over the steps to make the full potion, the correct way to reduce it for brewing from a base, and the equations to test its theoretical efficiency--all exercises tainted with Dark, some more than others. Hermione takes to the Dark Arts like she was made for them, which is a source of poorly-hidden pride until Professor Snape catches her little half-smile and says, derisively, "Of course the Dark Arts are easy, Miss Granger. They _want_ to be performed; any fool will do. They take a toll that few can afford, and I've yet to be convinced you'll be among the lucky ones."

For several days after that first stirring, Hermione holds down only half of what she eats, and the headaches behind her eyes keep her out of the library. When the queasiness disappears, she has a new set of problems. Certain charms are unpredictable; the shrivelfig isn't the only plant that reacts, and several potions are too difficult to brew correctly with the modifications she has to make for the Dark. She has a sixth sense for it, not quite smell. The Dark magic is all over her, neither rancid nor honeyed. She can feel it occasionally on others as well--mostly woven subtly about Professor Snape, but it puddles around Crabbe one morning and fades before the next day, clumps in Daphne's long hair another afternoon like a wad of chewing gum, and clings to a Ravenclaw hurrying down the sixth floor hall.

"You're not in class," Lavender says suspiciously, seating herself next to Hermione in the library.

"More important things to do," Hermione says without looking up from the index she's scanning.

"Hermione," Lavender says. "You're always in class. I have a free hour--but N.E.W.T.s are next week and even Ron's in class." Lavender leans into Hermione's personal space to squint at the book. Hermione turns the page under her nose, making Lavender pull a few inches back. "Are you still looking for a blocking spell? Wouldn't it be easier to, I don't know, brew a poison and dump it on You-Know-Who? I have ten strands of Neville's hair from Hannah. You know I'm right about Neville; you should use that."

"Leave me alone, Lavender," Hermione says. "Even if I agreed, I don't have the time to brew it, or any way to get it to You-Know-Who."

"I bet one of your Slytherin friends would take it to him. Anyway, Fay's better at divination that I am, and she says that Neville's hair is his strength."

"Honestly," Hermione says, reaching the end of the page ("Fence posts, p. 946") and turning to the next ("Fencing, p. 217-26"). "That means nothing. Everyone's hair is their strength; even muggle metaphors represent strength as uncut hair. Enough about the prophecy."

"No," Lavender says. "Fay saw how important this is, and so did I. If I can spend three whole years trying to get Ron to notice me, I can sit here until you agree."

Hermione sighs; she doesn't doubt Lavender's ability to annoy her indefinitely. "Fine. Then help me find a potion for it. If you want me to use Neville's hair, then find one with human hair as an ingredient. It'll have to be something that can be brewed by someone--someone tainted." She has to explain what that means, and then she has to stalk over the the stacks and select the books for Lavender to look through.

"Do you have a list?" Lavender asks, eying the pile of books Hermione sets in front of her. "A list, you know, of the potions you can make with your universal one? I want to try something first."

Hermione hands it over and goes back to her index of spellwork while Lavender does something complicated involving a knot of hair, her wand held by its point, and parchment with the alphabetised list of potions accepted by the Universal Base unrolled and pinned down at the top and the bottom by potions books. Hermione gets through three more pages of the index before Lavender squeaks and is promptly shushed by Madam Pince.

"This one," Lavender whispers, gesturing with her wand, which she is still holding by the point. The grip of her wand jumps when she passes it over Hermione's handwriting. "The Strength Sapping Solution. You have to brew this one."

"You do remember it only affects the muscle group it touches, right?"

"So?"

"It's not going to be effective against someone like You-Know-Who, unless we make enough to fill a swimming pool," Hermoione explains, simplifying only a little. It's duration is also variable; Voldemort might not be weakened for more than a few moments. "I can't spare enough base for that."

"I thought you were bright," Lavender says. "That's not the point. We're just trying to get Neville's hair into a potion that has some effect--any effect--on You-Know-Who. Please? Pretty please? I'll never say another word about _your_ hair for the rest of my life, promise."

It'll take ten minutes to brew a small vial with the Universal Base, fifteen if she counts the preparation and clean-up. "Fine," Hermione agrees reluctantly. "Not more than a 15-millilitre vial."

"Perfect," Lavender says. She highlights the potion on Hermione's list and draws arrows pointing to it. "This one!" she writes in her loopy handwriting, using Hermione's red ink.

To Hermione's surprise, she also shelves the potions books before she leaves, and apparently shelves them correctly; Madam Pince doesn't hurry over afterwards to reshelve them in their proper places.

\---

"Malfoy could do it," Daphne suggests, leaning on her crossed arms on the far edge of the workstation where Hermione is supervising the brewing of the vial of Strength Sapping Solution for Lavender, using seven strands of Neville's hair. Draco is brewing because he's the best potions student at Hogwarts. The only reason Hermione gets better marks is that he's less of a perfectionist than she is, and he's too lazy to bother to memorising their textbook. She doesn't like it, but if Lavender's right about Neville, Hermione has to consider the hair as an ingredient to avoid at the moment, and Professor Snape agrees.

Draco's frowning slightly, his light eyes narrowed in concentration, which makes him look like a rat.

"I'm not saying she's right," Daphne continues. "But Malfoy'd probably be your best chance in getting it to You-Know-Who, unlike the rest of us who have to wait around until we're invited."

"Oh?" Draco says. "Want to trade, then? Your mum for my dad."

Daphne straightens, rolling her shoulders back. "You wouldn't last a week in my house. And then there's my dad. If I forgot about _your_ mum--what's she going to do, refuse to give me my allowance? Tell me I've disgraced the--"

"Enough about my mother," Draco says. Daphne mimes zipping her lips shut. Hermione glances over at Professor Snape, who is preparing sets of ingredients for the lower forms' exams.

Daphne follows her gaze and shakes her head. "We know better than to fight in front of him--don't we, Professor?"

"I dearly hope so," Professor Snape says without looking up, "or I've wasted my time with you lot over the years."

"I could do it," Draco says, waiting for Hermione's nod before decanting the Strength Sapping Solution into a vial and capping it. "It would be easy to get my dad to take me to him, and if I said I was ready to take the Mark, I could get--"

"No," Professor Snape says quietly. "If my advice means nothing to you, think of your mother's wishes."

"Between you and them," Draco says with the same soft menace, "I needn't think at all; my father has my life planned out and mum's list of things for me never to see or do would require yards of parchment. Sorry, Granger--you're stuck with clean-up."

Hermione watches him stomp out of the classroom, the little vial of Strength Sapping Solution still in his fist. She hears him exchange greetings with someone in the hall.

"Hecate's bones, it's cheery in here," Professor McGonagall says a few moments later, which answers the question of who Draco met in the hall. "Good evening, Miss Greengrass."

"Headmistress," says Daphne.

"This is neither the time nor the place, Minnie," Professor Snape says, stacking the crates of ingredients with enough force to make the glass jars rattle.

"We've disagreed as to whether Draco should take the Strength Sapping Solution to You-Know-Who," Hermione says, before they break their noses to avoid talking about it.

"Whose idea was that?" Professor McGonagall asks.

"You can thank Miss Greengrass for that one," Professor Snape says, sharp and curt.

"Bravo, my girl," Professor McGonagall says. "That's the first reasonable thing I've heard anyone say this long evening; it might even work."

"I don't need false praise," Daphne says stiffly.

"I disapprove of what's on your arm," Professor McGonagall replies, matching Daphne's tone. "But I like what's between your ears. Now, Severus, this isn't at all what I came down here for. Do you have a few minutes to spare?"

Ron, when Hermione tells him the whole story, agrees with Professor McGonagall, except for the part about approving of Daphne's cleverness. "I mean to say," Ron says, "who that's got a bit of sense goes and gets a Dark Mark in the first place?"

\---

Harry's fever fades ten hours after the dose of Voldemort's soulbinding potion, while Hermione is sitting her Ancient Runes N.E.W.T. The itching begins sometime during the Arithmancy N.E.W.T., and by the time Hermione gets back to Harry, he's sneezing intermittently.

"There's nothing objectively wrong with him, Miss Granger," Madam Pomfrey says, "nothing at all. I've never seen a healthier young man."

"Don't listen to her," Harry says. "I'm in the wrong skin; I don't fit."

Draco's been gone since that morning, which no-one seemed to have noticed until the roll call for the Arithmancy N.E.W.T., when a charmed chair in the back of the room replies, "present!" only after Professor Vector called his name twice. Hermione spent the rest of the exam trying to catch Daphne's eye. Daphne knows where Draco is; Hermione would bet the little vial of Strength Sapping Solution is also missing.

"These aren't my bones," Harry says, and sneezes again. "Hermione, I can't feel my toes."

"Are you high? Is he high?" Ron asks.

Harry talks, more than Hermione's heard him say all year, about snuffing candles and unravelling socks. His aunt Petunia's shoes always scuffed on the second step of the stairs; he remembers the grain of the wood on the unpainted inside of the door to the cupboard under the stairs. "I want to stay with you," he says, lifting his head and focusing suddenly on Ron. "I don't want to go. I'm afraid of the dark. Tell Hermione I want to stay."

"Harry," Ron says. His arm tightens over Hermione's shoulder; his fingers dig into her arm.

"The antidote will be ready in an hour," Hermione says. "We tried everything to bring the delay down as much as possible." Beside her, Ron bites at his knuckles.

Madam Pomfrey throws them out when Harry starts talking about dying.

"Are you sure you have two days to give him the antidote?" Ron asks. "Please tell me you're sure--because that's not Harry in there."

"Of course I'm sure," Hermione says.

\---

"What if I'm wrong?" she asks Professor Snape when she goes to get the antidote.

He pauses, quill mid-air, halfway between the ink-pot and the final exam he's marking. A drop of red ink spreads on the blotter. "Then you're wrong," he says.

"What if I've ruined everything?"

"What do you want me to say?" he says, going back to his marking. "Neither I nor anyone else shall be able to put it right for you if you have."

She stands in the doorway of his office with the heavy bottle of antidote supported in both hands, watching the curl of his frown deepen as he marks off points. "Ron won't be able to take it."

"It makes no particular difference to me," Professor Snape says, "what Mr Weasley can or cannot endure." He sets his quill in its stand and looks up at her. "Shall I come with you?"

She shakes her head.

Instead she crushes Ron's hand while Harry tries to stutter his thanks through the first involuntary twitches that become convulsions, which become seizures that cease abruptly.

"Harry?" Hermione says. The touch of Dark that spread through him when he drank the potion is entirely gone.

"Is he dead?" Ron asks, his voice breaking.

"No," Madam Pomfrey replies with a quick glance at the monitoring spells. "He's still the healthiest young man I've ever seen."

\---

"Nothing I can say should delay or diminish your celebrations at the end of this difficult year," Professor McGonagall says, "so I will be brief, and merely give Slytherin House what they deserve: fifty points to each year for perseverance in the face of--"

Hermione thinks she finishes the sentence with, "adversity," but it's nearly drowned in cries of protest and booing from the other three houses. She turns in time to watch the hourglass fill up in seven fifty-point increments, leaving Slytherin a point ahead of Hufflepuff and fifteen behind Gryffindor.

Fireworks explode across the ceiling of the Great Hall, the first bursts startling enough of the students to quiet the booing, which fades into reluctant admiration for the charmed fireworks.

Hermione has no appetite. By the end of the second course, Ron has stopped asking if she's going to eat her meat pie or if he can have the rest of her chips and has appropriated her plate for his own use. She picks apart a heel of bread instead of eating.

She's aware of the shift of attention in the hall, but doesn't look up until Ron says, breathlessly, "Oh, Merlin..."

Draco, blond and white and bloody, Dark billowing around him like a cloak in the wind, stands just inside the open doors. Daphne and Theordore Nott are already on their feet as Hermione tries to untangle her legs from the bench.

"I think it worked," Draco says in a clear voice that pierces Hermione. "Sort of. Maybe. Feel anything, Nott?"

"No," Theodore says. "The Dark Lord isn't summoning."

Behind Hermione, the school rises to its feet. Benches scrape back across the stone floor, or fall with a clatter. Silverware is dropped; plates shatter, but Hermione hears a silence under it all.

Draco's wand is bloody. "I think it worked," he says again.

"What did you _do_?" Theodore Nott asks as Daphne gets her arms around Draco before he collapses. His left sleeve flaps, half-empty, heavy and wet with blood.

"Ran out of Blood-Replenishing Potion," Draco says.

"Granger," says Daphne. "Heal him."

"Uh," says Hermione, stopping in front of them and trying to catch her breath, as if she's run all the way from the Enchanted Forest. "I can't--I can't see the wound and I don't--all right, okay: concrescata."

The wand movement for the clotting spell is a broad cutting motion, smooth and slow. As she finishes, she becomes aware of the circle of Slytherins protecting them from the rest of the Great Hall, of the professors gathered at the fringes, of Professor McGonagall closing a hand that was supposed to hold Professor Snape back on air instead of on his trailing robes before he clips Hermione's outstretched arm.

"Stop him," Professor McGonagall mouths, or says; Hermione hears everything as though from underwater. She turns, placing herself in front of Professor Snape.

"No--" he says. "Move--I swore--I vowed--"

"It's okay," Hermione says. "He's okay, Professor--"

He claws at her as she holds him back with both magic and muscle. "Draco--wretched boy--"

"Still clean, Godfather," Draco says, his head tipped back on Daphne's shoulder, smearing blood on her chin. "I cut it off."

"Oh, no," Hermione breathes, and Professor Snape folds into her arms, shaking, as though he's the one who has been drained of strength and blood.

"Dumped the Strength Sapping Solution on it first. I think it worked."

\---

"I expect she'll do what most of our muggleborn students do," Professor McGonagall is saying to Hermione's mum. Their faces glow in the flickering Bluebell light. "Go home and get a job for a year or so while she decides where she belongs."

"Ron told us he was setting up house with--Violet?" Hermione's mum says.

"Lavender," Hermione's dad supplies.

"And that they're both looking for jobs. As only Hogwarts graduates. Is that--common?"

"Rather," Professor McGonagall says. "But Hermione isn't. I suspect she's already planning the requests for apprenticeship that she will probably send out this summer. Aren't you?"

Hermione squints up at the stars and shrugs. Ron only spoke to her parents to avoid speaking to her.

Hercules and the Dragon are faint beyond the Bluebell glow and the lights from the castle, one over the other like Draco and Daphne, when Draco fainted and Daphne dropped to her knees the night before. "Stop snivelling," Professor Snape said, later, as if Hermione couldn't still feel the ghost of his shuddering against her. "Had I touched him, with that much Dark on him, none of this could have been brewed." This--the array of strong revitalizing potions, several of them brewed from Hermione's Universal Base, lined up by Draco's hospital bed. When Hermione finally returned to her common room, the Gryffindors stumbled out of her way, and even Ginny flinched when Hermione touched her shoulder to get her attention. "How can you save Draco after what you did to Harry?" Ginny demanded. Ron defended Hermione--Harry isn't _dead_ \--, and Lavender apologised whilst she settled in her own bed, but nothing is so simple any longer.

"Not university?" her dad asks, elbowing Hermione with the arm she's holding onto in order to get her to loosen her grip.

"We're a small community," Professor McGonagall explains with a stern glance at Hermione and a smile for her dad. "Of course there are the guilds, but we do lose many of our brightest to muggle institutions. Hermione, whether it's Cambridge or the Deutche Zunft für Verwandlungswerk, you only have to ask."

"Thanks, Professor," Hermione says, letting go of her dad's arm. She doesn't deserve a recommendation and she doesn't want the help. She wants to be able to do something simple: to alphabetize a drawer of files, to answer a phone, to count galleons and sickles and make change--things that don't go wrong, in a place where no one knows what she is capable of.

She leaves her parents with Mr and Mrs Weasley and follows Professor McGonagall down to the water.

The graduation ceremony is held every year beside the Great Lake, under a canopy of light from jars of glowing Bluebell flames. The students cluster at the edge of the water. Hermione's class has always been one of the smallest years at Hogwarts, but it feels incomplete now. Slytherin is missing a handful of students who were pulled out of school over the course of the year by parents worried about the growing prejudice. Neville isn't the only one who they'll never see again. Harry is in a coma at St Mungo's, and Draco looks like he's even farther away, though he's standing with his housemates, the stump of his arm bandaged and hidden in the folds of his sleeve. Professor McGonagall's speech is short and warm. Kingsley speaks on behalf of the Ministry, seemingly oblivious to the gaps among them left by Voldemort and Dumbledore. Voldemort is still out there, alive if silent--but Kingsley says nothing about that, either.

They crush their pointy black students' hats underfoot. Hermione's own hat is safe, folded neatly and tucked between her mum's hands.

Her classmates scramble to sit with friends, rocking the charmed boats as they climb into them. Hermione's first glimpse of the castle was from this lake in these same boats. At eleven, she was all eager awe and disguised uncertainty. They will leave Hogwarts for the last time by crossing the Great Lake again, returning to the world they left as children, armed now with knowledge. Some of them haven't changed. Hannah is still sweet; Millicent is still a bully. Hermione's younger self wouldn't know Hermione any longer at all, except by her hair, as bushy now as ever. She's gained seven years, nine N.E.W.T.s, and a swathe of soot and darkness on her soul.

It's easier than Hermione expects to take slow steps back as the crowd moves forward, until she finds herself standing behind of the group of parents, on the slope between the Great Lake and the castle.

"You'll miss the boats, Miss Granger," Professor Snape says, stepping up beside her.

"Maybe it's better if I do," Hermione says. "I can't go back the same way and face how much of myself I've-- Maybe later," she concludes.

Professor Snape looks at her thoughtfully out of the corner of his eye. There's a green and silver ribbon pinned to his lapel; in the night, the green looks black and the silver glints blue, but Hermione saw it earlier. He looks, otherwise, perfectly ordinary, wearing the same set of robes he wears to teach, as though tonight were the same as any other night. She wishes now that she hadn't sorted through her school robes earlier and chosen the only set left without stains from potions spatter.

The first boats push off onto the lake to the swell of proud applause from the parents and teachers on the shore.

"No," he agrees finally. "I never could, either."

The lanterns on the boats fade across the lake. The carriages that transport the rest of the crowd to the other side of the Great Lake depart one by one.

"Aren't you going?" Hermione asks. "We'll have to walk up the drive."

"You ought to have considered that earlier," he says, "if you didn't want my company."

Knowledge is as beautiful as a scattering of stars, or the warmth underneath the irritation in his voice. Hermione could stretch out one finger and touch his hand. If she did, he wouldn't flinch away.


End file.
